by Joe Craig
He ducked under the vehicle barrier and in seconds he’d reached the door of the main building. That too was unguarded. This place is deserted, Jimmy thought to himself. Would Professor Wilson even be here?
Jimmy stepped cautiously into the main reception area. It was an old Victorian hallway, with navy tiles and an ornate plasterwork ceiling. Jimmy’s eyes darted up and down the corridors that stretched out on either side. They were dark except for a dim light coming from a doorway at one far end. He crept along the corridor, his footsteps as silent as the rest of the building. He felt a struggle stirring inside him. Breaching security shouldn’t have been this easy. It felt like a trap.
No, Jimmy told himself, refusing to give in to his fears. He didn’t have a choice. And if radiation poisoning was going to kill him anyway, what did he have to lose? Being ambushed now would only make things simpler. He grimaced with determination and strained against his programming, using the energy to propel himself forwards, step by step.
He swung round into the doorway, bracing himself for a counter-attack, but there was nobody in the room. Jimmy was looking into a small office, with the blinds drawn. Books lined the walls and there was an old desk in the centre of the room with a lamp on it that threw a pool of pale yellow light around the middle of the room. Jimmy felt like a fool. He told himself to return to the lobby so he could begin to track down Professor Wilson properly. But then a whisper shattered the silence.
“Jimmy!”
The voice stabbed into Jimmy’s brain. Suddenly his blood was pumping at triple speed. He peered into the shadows in the corner of the room and watched a slim figure step into the lamplight.
“Eva!” Jimmy’s mouth dropped open, then melted into a smile. As soon as he felt the tingle of joy at seeing his sister’s best friend, it was snatched away by the expression on her face. With her eyes stretched wide and her lips pursed she was a picture of fear. Jimmy was about to run to her, but froze at the tiny, almost imperceptible shake of Eva’s head. Then her eyes flitted around the room, first to the lamp, then to three points on the bookshelves.
Without moving his head, Jimmy followed her guidance and realised what he was meant to see—like fireflies pinned at different points around the room, four tiny lenses reflected the glow of the lamp. Jimmy and Eva were being watched.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” Eva announced, her voice flat and deliberately empty of emotion. Jimmy knew he had to be careful. NJ7 must be watching and any sign that Eva and Jimmy were still on the same side would be a catastrophe. As far as they knew, Eva had betrayed Jimmy and was working against him.
“I didn’t expect to see you again,” Jimmy snarled. He saw Eva’s face relax slightly now she knew Jimmy was going to maintain the illusion that they were enemies.
“I’m sorry about what happened, Jimmy,” Eva protested, a glint in her eye. “I had to do it, believe me.” Jimmy was impressed by her acting. It even looked like she was enjoying this a little. “But I want to help you now.”
Jimmy didn’t know how to answer. He felt a surge of hope. Eva had always been clever—perhaps she really had found a way of helping him right under the noses of NJ7.
“Your burns…” Eva whispered, reaching towards him.
“You can’t help me,” Jimmy replied, pushing her hand away. He had to force his words and his voice to send out the exact opposite of the emotion thumping in his chest. “How did you find me?”
“The doctor who helped you at the hospital,” Eva explained, her words rushing out. “He wasn’t meant to let you escape.”
“I suppose Miss Bennett has punished him for that.”
“Badly.” The sudden note of desolation in Eva’s voice seemed genuine. Jimmy couldn’t bear to imagine what NJ7 had done to that doctor simply because their plan to ensnare Jimmy at the hospital had failed.
“He told us that this was the only place you could be going,” Eva went on. “He said he’d accidentally mentioned the name of it and you might have remembered.”
Jimmy nodded slowly, the implications filtering through his mind. It wasn’t just the name of the institute that the doctor had mentioned… Eva seemed to read his mind.
“Professor Wilson…” She couldn’t finish her sentence. Tears trembled in her eyes. Jimmy felt a horrible queasiness in his gut. He rushed forwards and pushed Eva out of the way. There, curled up on the floor behind the desk, was the body of a middle-aged man. His piercing blue eyes stared up at the ceiling. The muscles in his throat seemed tense, as if he’d died in the middle of a scream. His square-rimmed glasses were twisted across the bridge of his nose.
Jimmy shook with rage. “What did they…?” He swallowed his question and instead punched his fists against the desk. He cracked straight through the wood, then swept his palms across the table top, letting out a blood-curdling cry. Professor Wilson’s papers flew all over the room. The lamp crashed to the ground, but didn’t break, so its light shone straight up into Jimmy’s face, deepening the creases in his anguished frown.
“I’m sorry, Jimmy,” Eva whispered. “Did you know him?”
“You don’t understand,” Jimmy hissed. “I…” He couldn’t bring himself to explain. “There must be somebody else here.” He was frantic. “Somebody who worked with Professor Wilson. Maybe they’ll be able to—”
“NJ7 arrested everybody else,” Eva explained. “We’re the only people here.”
Jimmy was struggling to keep his concentration. He couldn’t take his eyes off the body on the floor and the way the man’s fists were twisted into his chest.
“Jimmy, listen,” Eva insisted. “I don’t have long. I’m risking my life talking to you.”
Jimmy was confused. Why was Eva saying that? They both knew already that NJ7 were watching. But then Jimmy doubted himself. There was something strange about the way Eva was speaking. Did Eva want NJ7 to think she was helping Jimmy or tricking him? Were they even really being watched at all?
“I waited here for you,” Eva went on. Jimmy’s brain was doing somersaults trying to work out the possibilities of what plan Eva was following—and whose. “You’re not safe, but I’m on your side now.”
I know, Jimmy wanted to shout at the top of his voice. Why did you come here just to tell me this? And why did you warn me about the cameras? All he could do was stare at his friend, baffled. There was something in Eva’s eyes. Her expression was blank and she’d forced back her tears, but behind all that Jimmy could see an intensity he couldn’t understand. It was as if she was trying to beam a thought from her eyes directly into Jimmy’s head, but Jimmy had no idea what it was.
“You came to meet Professor Wilson,” Eva said, her voice quivering now. “So shake his hand.”
Now Jimmy was even more confused. Had Eva gone crazy? Perhaps waiting in this small office with a dead body had sent her into some kind of hysteria. She walked to the door and turned back to fix Jimmy with one last stare.
“Shake his hand, Jimmy,” she insisted. “You’ll know what to do then.”
Jimmy watched her leave, hardly able to move until the click of her footsteps up the corridor had faded away. Finally, he turned back to the body. Shake his hand?
He dropped to one knee, peering closely at the body. Could this man have saved him? The thought flew into his head. Forget that, he ordered himself. I’ll find another way. Then he spotted something that distracted him from all those other worries. There was something sticking out of Professor Wilson’s right fist—a sliver of green.
Jimmy leaned in closer, trying to block out the man’s wildly staring eyes. The body was still warm. Jimmy could feel it as he came closer, and Wilson’s cologne wafted up. Jimmy could taste it at the back of his throat. Still wrestling with his disgust, Jimmy gripped the tip of the green sliver in his fingertips and pulled it away. Wilson’s fist gave it up easily—whatever this was, it obviously hadn’t been in the Professor’s hand when he died. That was probably just the place Eva had chosen to hide it. But was it Eva, Jimmy asked hims
elf, or NJ7?
“You’ll know what to do,” Eva had said.
Jimmy stared at the object in his palm: a green flash drive. He couldn’t help letting out a bitter laugh and muttering to himself, “A green stripe.”
11 RATE OF DILAPIDATION
Jimmy hurried away from the institute. The wooded lanes seemed to close in around him, stifling his thoughts. He tried to maintain a steady jog, but he could feel his muscles throbbing, almost begging for a fight. On top of that, he still had only socks on his feet and his eyes wouldn’t keep still. An ambush could come from anywhere. If NJ7 had been watching him, surely they’d take this opportunity to try to kill him. There were no cars around and the only buildings were huge mansions set back from the road and shielded by high walls or thick foliage. When the attack came, nobody would know about it except Jimmy.
Eva had told him that he’d know what to do, and now that seemed pretty simple—find a computer, plug in the flash drive and see what was on it. He’d dismissed the thought of using the computers at the institute. Any second another team of gunmen could arrive and Jimmy didn’t plan to make their jobs even easier by sitting at a keyboard in the next office waiting for them. Instead, he’d slipped under the blind and escaped out of the window, back into the twilight.
He hadn’t even worked out where he should go. The flash drive was clenched in his fist. He considered breaking into the next house he came to and ‘borrowing’ a computer for a few minutes, but it went against every instinct: the occupants would certainly call the police and that would bring trouble. Maybe Eva had somehow managed to stop NJ7 following him away from the institute and, if she had, stumbling into a local house was only going to undo her work.
Jimmy tensed at the sound of a car speeding towards him from behind. The engine sounded powerful—a deep, even growl that mingled with the rumble of the tyres on the road. Jimmy would have immediately jumped for cover, but the noise stirred something in his memory. He felt his legs slowing him down before he even knew why. How could he possibly identify that this car wasn’t a threat just from the sound of the engine?
He cautiously glanced over his shoulder. As soon as he did, he realised that this was no ordinary car. The sound of a Bentley Arnage T gliding along a country road was unmistakable—once heard, never forgotten. And Jimmy would certainly never forget the only man he knew who owned a Bentley—Christopher Viggo. He’d stolen the car from the French Embassy thirteen years before when he’d needed some fast transport in which to escape from NJ7.
Jimmy slowed to a walk and couldn’t help smiling as the sleek body of the navy Bentley decelerated to keep pace with him. It looked in much better shape than the last time Jimmy had seen it, when it had been covered in dents and scratches. The window of the passenger seat lowered and the driver peered across.
“You know not to accept lifts from strange men, right?” It was Viggo, just as Jimmy had expected.
“You got nothing better to do than fix up your car?” Jimmy asked. “This thing was junk last time I saw it. And didn’t it use to be green?”
“Are we going to talk all night or are you getting in?”
Jimmy grinned and jumped into the passenger seat. He couldn’t believe he was back with Christopher Viggo. It brought up so many questions he didn’t know where to start. All he could do was smile at the man and stare. But Viggo wasn’t smiling back.
“What’s going on, Jimmy?” he barked, powering the Bentley round the curves of the road. He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and flicked a folded up piece of paper at Jimmy. “What’s all this about?”
Jimmy unfolded the paper and found himself staring at a printed sheet of numbers, graphs and names of chemicals with some scribbled comments in a box at the bottom. Before Jimmy could work out what it was, Viggo spoke again, the tension in his voice obvious. “The doctor gave it to me,” he explained.
“The doctor?” Jimmy gasped. “You mean Professor Wilson?”
“No—the doctor at the hospital. The one who had you bandaged up and trapped in a deserted ward on the top floor. Or don’t you remember?”
Jimmy didn’t know what to say and his confusion showed.
“He and I had a little chat,” Viggo explained, “just before he…” Viggo’s voice dropped away for a second and he took a deep breath. “I was too late to stop NJ7 doing…whatever they did to him, and maybe he deserved it if he gave you over to them. But he had enough strength left to tell me what he’d told them, plus a little bit more when he realised I was a friend of yours. I think he genuinely felt sorry for betraying you. He kept mumbling about how he didn’t realise you’d have human emotions. Wasted his dying breath saying sorry.”
“Dying breath?” Jimmy whispered, suddenly cold. There was an awkward silence for a moment.
“I’m sorry, Jimmy,” shrugged Viggo eventually. “I’ll never be much good at breaking bad news.”
Jimmy fought back his emotions, trying to make sense of what was happening. So two men had died because of him that night. A doctor and a professor.
“How did you know I was even there in the first place?” he asked, struggling to stop his voice wavering.
“I saw you on a news report,” Viggo explained. “After the explosion at the tower block they were showing all the casualties being taken into the hospital.” He glanced across the car with a glint in his eye. “You have to be careful where you put that face, Jimmy. You might get burned.”
“Very funny,” said Jimmy, without a smile.
“You were only on the screen for a split-second,” Viggo went on, “but you’re lucky nobody at NJ7 spotted you. They had to wait for the tip-off from the doctor. Otherwise they would have had you killed while you were still unconscious.”
Of course, Jimmy thought. He had a vague memory of seeing the news crew outside the hospital, but he’d been so close to blacking out he hadn’t had the presence of mind to hide from the cameras.
“Come on!” Viggo startled Jimmy out of his thoughts. “What’s that piece of paper all about?”
“I don’t know,” Jimmy replied meekly. His eyes ran up and down the page, hardly taking anything in. “You’re the one who gave it to me.”
“And I got it from the doctor at the hospital. He was desperate for you to know that he’d managed to hide it from NJ7. So it must be important. What’s all that stuff at the bottom about the ‘rate of decay’, or something…?”
Jimmy squinted at the loopy handwriting at the bottom of the page. It was hard to make out the words because the paper was thin and there wasn’t enough light. The first time he read it, it still made no sense, until he realised what it was.
“He tested my blood,” Jimmy gasped. “He actually tested me…” Jimmy’s hand started to tremble. The blue haze at his finger tips shimmered in the dim light as if his own body was mocking him.
“What are you talking about?” Viggo asked impatiently.
Jimmy’s words tumbled out in a rush as he read the doctor’s notes.
“I gave the doctor a blood sample,” he explained. “To run tests on. When I found out he’d called NJ7, I assumed he hadn’t done the tests, but he must have changed his mind or something. Because these are the results.”
“Tests for what?” asked Viggo. “What’s—”
“Radiation poisoning,” Jimmy cut in. Viggo’s face twisted in shock, but Jimmy carried on before his friend could say anything. “It’s a long story. The French tricked me. I got poisoned and I should be dead by now, but I’m not. And according to this…” His eyes scoured the test results again, every word and statistic taking on new meaning. He felt a hot rush of blood to his face.
“It said something about the rate of decay…” said Viggo. “What’s that?”
Jimmy ran his finger along the doctor’s notes, but he was taking too long for Viggo. The man snatched the paper back and held it against the steering wheel, flicking his eyes between the words and the road.
“The ‘rate of dilapidation’,” he cor
rected himself. “It says it’s much slower than it should be. Jimmy, it says you should be dead by now, but only a low percentage of your cells are reproducing erratically.” He read some more, while trying to concentrate on driving. “It says something about an ‘extended latent phase’…Jimmy…” His voice brightened. “It says at this rate you could survive for some time!”
“Some time?” Jimmy repeated, grabbing the paper back. “How much time?”
“That’s all it says: ‘some time’.”
“What?” Jimmy shouted, his electrifying joy colliding with a potent fury. “How much time?! And what can I do to cure it?! This is useless!” He slammed his palm against the dashboard.
“What’s your problem Jimmy?” Viggo yelled. “You’ve just been told you’re not dying. Get over it.”
Jimmy had never felt such powerful and conflicting emotions. “I am dying,” he insisted, between gritted teeth. “All this says is that I’m dying slowly.”
“So join the rest of us,” Viggo shot back. “Welcome to the human race: dying slowly is the only thing everybody has in common.”
Jimmy shut his eyes for a second, as if that would blank out Viggo’s voice. But there was one word that would always cut straight through to Jimmy’s nerves: human. Slowly Jimmy began to understand what it was that bothered him so much. The test results had forced him to come face to face with the fact that he was living the nightmare of discovering he wasn’t entirely human, but without the benefit of being invulnerable. It was yet another piece of his destiny that he couldn’t control, and it didn’t look like there were any doctors who could help him without getting killed.
“I’m sorry, Jimmy,” Viggo whispered. “I didn’t mean…”
“It’s OK,” said Jimmy, at last able to calm himself a little.
“You’ll cheer up when you see the others.”
The others? Jimmy thought. Then it hit him with an inner explosion of genuine elation: his mum, his sister and Felix.
“They’re with you?” he asked, almost bouncing in his seat. Viggo nodded. “I knew it! Are they OK?”
