Necropolis pof-4

by Anthony Horowitz

The guard did as he was told. A second guard appeared. He was less fortunate. Lohan shot him down. They had been in the prison for less than three minutes but they knew that reinforcements would already be on the way. There was another explosion upstairs, a scream, the clatter of bullets hitting metal.

  Thirty doors stretched out in front of them. There was no point looking for bolts or keys. Lohan rapped out an order and his men blew them open, one at a time, using balls of plastic explosive. Richard and Jamie continued forward as, one after another, the doors were smashed out of their frames, orange flames briefly flaring up. The corridor stank of cordite. Smoke and brick dust filled the air. But every cell was empty. How much more time did they have?

  “They’re at the end,” Jamie said suddenly. “The last door on the left.”

  Lohan stared at him. But Richard nodded, relief surging through him. Somehow Jamie had managed to connect with them in his own way… telepathically. Lohan shouted something and his men ran down to the door he had indicated. A final blast. It swung open. Two figures came out into the corridor, choking and covered in dust. It was Matt and Scarlett.

  “Matt!” Richard grabbed hold of his friend and embraced him. The night before, when he had pulled himself out of the water, he had been afraid that he would never see him again. “Are you OK?”

  Matt nodded. “This is Scarlett.”

  “I’m delighted to meet you.” Richard didn’t know what else to say. He examined the girl with the close-cropped hair. She looked worn out.

  Jamie said nothing but he went over to her so that the three Gatekeepers were together.

  “We have to get to the Tai Shan Temple,” Matt said.

  Lohan was impressed. The boy was only fifteen but already he had assumed command. The experiences of the past twenty-four hours didn’t seem to have had any effect on him. But there was still more trouble to come. Quickly, Lohan took out his mobile phone, pressed a button and spoke a few words. He waited until he had heard what he wanted, then he turned to Matt. “The temple is safe now,” he said. “But we have another problem and it may be more serious. There is a storm. In fact my people are saying that it may be something worse…”

  But they had all become aware of it. Above the gunfire and the explosions. Beyond the battle that was taking place inside the prison, the wind was screaming. The whole building was shuddering. The full force of the typhoon had fallen on Hong Kong and its total destruction had begun.

  The sun was setting in Cuzco, the ancient city of the Incas, in Peru. There was a band playing and the sound of pan-pipes and the throb of drums rose up into the evening air. The shadows were stretching out over the foothills. The restaurants and cafes were beginning to fill up at the end of another day.

  Pedro knew that they shouldn’t be here. This wasn’t Matt’s plan. He wished that they had been able to speak over the satellite telephone, but for the past forty-eight hours there had been only silence. A whole world separated them. They were thousands of miles apart. But he was about to take the single step that would bring them together. He wondered if it was a good idea.

  Not that he had been given any choice.

  The night before, Pedro had woken up to find Scott leaning over him. The two boys were sharing a stone house in Vilcabamba, high up in the Andes. This was the lost city where Pedro had gone with Matt when they were hiding from Diego Salamanda. It was hidden above the cloud forest in an extraordinary location, a mountain peak that couldn’t be seen by anyone. Getting there had involved a helicopter ride and then a one-day hike from Cuzco. The city itself could only be reached by a stone staircase which could vanish in a single moment.

  “Scott…? What is it?”

  Scott was deathly pale and his eyes were full of worry. Pedro had never seen him like this before. “Jamie’s in trouble,” he said. “We have to go to Hong Kong.”

  “We can’t…”

  “Pedro. You don’t understand. We have to go straight away. I have to go to Jamie. I’ve had a dream.”

  The dreamworld. All of them had been there. They all knew its significance. They had talked about it often enough. Pedro knew that he couldn’t argue. If Scott had been sent a message, they couldn’t ignore it, particularly if it involved his brother. And yet the doors were supposed to be too dangerous. It was the whole reason Matt and Jamie had flown to Europe and why the two of them had been left behind.

  “Are you sure…?” he began.

  Scott wasn’t in the mood for an argument. “I’m leaving as soon as it’s light,” he said. “You can come with me or you can stay behind.”

  The next morning they left together. One of the Incas escorted them down to the clearing where the helicopter was waiting and then it was a two-hour flight to Cuzco airport. All the time, Scott had been silent and intense. He still hadn’t explained what he had seen. He was often reserved but now he seemed miles away, staring ahead with empty eyes. Pedro was trying not to think what they were letting themselves in for. Of all the Gatekeepers, he alone had never been through one of the doors, and the thought of transporting himself half-way round the world filled him with dread.

  And here they were now in Cuzco. It was a beautiful evening with hundreds of tourists milling around the brightly coloured stalls that were spread out in front of them. The cathedral would be closing soon. The last visitors were coming out, surrounded by street children, begging for money and sweets. Taxis, like wind-up toys made out of tin, were buzzing around the main square.

  Pedro was hungry but he didn’t dare suggest that they stop and eat. He knew what the answer would be.

  “There it is…” Scott pointed at a great pile of bricks and ornate windows, a Spanish church built on the site of a place of worship that had been there centuries before. The Temple of Coricancha. It was where he and Jamie had found themselves when they first arrived in Peru. Inside was the doorway that had brought them from a cave in Nevada.

  Neither of them spoke again. Pedro shook his head and followed as, with grim determination, Scott began to walk across the square.

  Matt and Scarlett stood in the shelter of the prison, knowing that they couldn’t leave. Hong Kong was being torn apart by a force so devastating it was as if they had arrived at some chapter in the Bible when all the old prophecies happened and Judgement Day finally arrived.

  Smashed buildings and debris were being flung along the street as if they weighed nothing. As they looked out of the broken doorway, a huge neon sign spun past like an oversized playing card. It was followed by a table, several crates, a lawn mower, part of a piano… They had somehow been sucked out of the shops and sent on their way as if they were prizes in some insane TV game show. Matt could actually see the air currents. Mixed with the rain, they had become a thousand grey needles that raced along the streets, slamming into cars and tipping them over, flattening everything in their path.

  He looked up and saw two clouds rushing together, moving faster than he could have believed. They hit and there was a massive burst of thunder. A bolt of electricity so bright that it hurt his eyes crackled down and smashed into a skyscraper half a mile away, cutting it in two. Shards of glass and broken pieces of metal burst outwards as the top seven storeys of the building leaned over and then fell, trailing wires and pipes. Matt didn’t see where they landed or how many people were killed but he heard the massive explosion as they hit the street below. Despite the rain, what remained of the building caught fire. The orange flames licked at the falling water, desperately trying to climb into the air.

  “We must wait…” Lohan was right next to him. Matt understood what he meant. If they took so much as one step forward out of the protection of the walls, they would be whisked away. He was having to shout the words to make himself heard.

  “We can’t wait!” Matt shouted back. “We only have this one chance. We must leave Hong Kong now.”

  Scarlett was behind him with Richard and Jamie. Matt turned round and their eyes met – and in that moment they both understood what was happening. They c
ould have no secrets from each other. “This is you!” he shouted at her. The wind was still howling. A window on the other side of the road was suddenly torn out, the glass leaping away. “You’ve done this…”

  “No!” Scarlett shook her head, trying to deny it.

  “We all have powers. All five of us. This is yours.”

  And Scarlett knew he was right. In a way, she had known it all along.

  Her real name wasn’t Scarlett Adams. White Lotus believed that she was a reincarnation of Lin Mo, a figure out of Chinese mythology, a goddess of the sea. And if she had once been a goddess, then she would have a power that went far beyond anything humanly possible. The chairman of Nightrise had made another mistake. He had thought she could only predict the weather. In fact she could control it.

  The evidence had always been there. At school in Dulwich, when Scarlett had wanted to go on a history trip, the weather had cleared up against all expectations. The same thing had happened again in Hong Kong when she needed to get to The Peak. Against all the forecasts, the rain had stopped and the sun had suddenly come out.

  She had even used the same power at the battle, ten thousand years before. Jamie had once described it to Matt. Just as Pedro had appeared with his reinforcements, a storm had started, the rain coming down so violently that the Old Ones had been unable to see him.

  It hadn’t been a coincidence.

  It had been her.

  The chairman had claimed that she was the weakest of the Five. He had been wrong. She was by far the most powerful.

  “You can stop it!” Matt shouted.

  “I can’t!” Scarlett shook her head. She had brought the dragon. She accepted that much. But looking inside herself, after three days in prison, after all she had been through, she knew that she didn’t have the strength to turn it back.

  “Then you can protect us. You can keep it away.”

  Scarlett looked out into the road, at the crashing rain, the buildings being scattered like confetti, cars spinning crazily, broken pieces of wood and metal hurtling past. Had she really done this, brought destruction on an entire city? How many people would she have killed? The thought terrified her more than anything else she had seen. Was she really responsible for this?

  “I can’t do it, Matt…”

  “You have to… We have to reach the temple.”

  Lohan understood. “It’s not so far from here,” he shouted. “I can show you…”

  “Scar…?” Matt looked at her.

  And maybe it was simply the fact that he had used that name, a name from ten thousand years ago. Maybe that was the trigger. But in that second, something changed. Scarlett took a deep breath. For too long she had been a victim, pushed around by the chairman, by the Old Ones, even by the Triads. It was time to put that behind her. She was a Gatekeeper. That was what had brought her into all this and suddenly she felt a great anger for everything she had lost – her friends, her home, – even her father. And with the anger came the full knowledge of her own strength. She knew what she had to do.

  “Follow me,” she said.

  They left the prison. First Lohan, then Scarlett and Matt, with Richard and Jamie behind. They stepped outside into the rain, into the wind, into an endless explosion as nature pounded the city with all its strength. They should have been thrown off their feet instantly, or battered senseless to the ground. But the wind spun around them. The rain was lashing everything but they remained dry. They walked into the heart of the typhoon and it swallowed them up without touching them. It was as if they were inside a glass ball that surrounded and protected them. They could barely see. Everything was chaos. But while they stayed together, they were safe.

  Lohan led the way but it was Scarlett who made it possible. She seemed to be in a trance, gazing straight ahead, her arms by her side. Matt kept close to her, knowing that his life depended on her protection. All around them, everywhere he looked, brick walls crumbled, buildings fell, windows shattered and, spinning in the rain, lethal shards of broken glass came slashing down. Again and again the thunder sounded. The clouds were a boiling mass.

  They didn’t hurry. There was no need to. No living thing was going to come out in the typhoon and the five of them were completely invisible. Scarlett was more confident now. She looked almost relaxed. Walking next to her, Matt was amazed by the extent of her power. He could feel it flowing out of her. She was a girl and she was fifteen years old. But she could destroy the entire world.

  Another building fell behind them, crumbling in on itself as if it had simply lost the will to live. Bricks showered down, slamming into the pavement, but not near them. The road continued straight ahead. They could see the park. Most of the trees had been uprooted and turned into flying battering rams. The few that remained were bending over, kissing the ground. The Tai Shan Temple was on the other side. Matt was surprised that it was still standing, but perhaps the wall that surrounded it had protected it from the worst of the weather.

  Lohan pointed. Scarlett nodded. There was no need for any of them to speak. They had made it. They had crossed Hong Kong in the middle of a Signal Ten typhoon and they had survived.

  Moving faster now, they crossed what was left of the park and went in.

  The chairman of the Nightrise Corporation was watching the final destruction of his necropolis. He was back in his office on the sixty-sixth floor of The Nail and he could feel the whole building trembling as it was buffeted again and again by the storm. Every now and then there was a grinding sound followed by an explosion of breaking glass as another window burst out of its frame. The lights had long ago flickered and gone out. There was no power in the office. Nor were there any people. The staff had all evacuated, fighting and clawing their way down sixty-six flights of stairs. Some of them might have made it to the basement and would be huddled there now, but he suspected that many more of them would have been killed on the way down – pushed down the stairs or trampled in the general panic. The chairman certainly had no intention of joining them. He was safe here. The Nail could stand up to anything. And it was a spectacular view.

  It did trouble him that his plans had somehow gone wrong. The city had been meant to die. That had been the whole idea. But not like this. Indeed, the typhoon might well end up saving many more people than it actually killed because there had been a side-effect. The poisonous gases put in place by the Old Ones had been dispersed. The pollution had been swept away. When the storm finally eased off, the people would be able to breathe again.

  He didn’t know what had happened at Victoria Prison. All the telephone lines were down and even his mobile didn’t work. The whole network must have collapsed. But this devastation couldn’t be a coincidence. The girl must have brought it. She was able to predict the weather so at the very least she must have known it was coming. He had put the boy in with her to taunt her, to show her how completely defeated she had been. Perhaps, all in all, it had been a mistake.

  He was holding a bottle of Cognac. It had a price tag that made it one of the most expensive in the world and it had always amused him that there were people dying in some countries because they had no water while he could afford to spend five thousand dollars on a drink he didn’t even enjoy. Over the years, most of the chairman’s taste buds had died. Nothing he ate or drank had any flavour. If he was killed now, it would hardly matter. Most of him was dead anyway.

  But he wasn’t going to die. Even if Matt and Scarlett had escaped, there was nowhere for them to go. The Tai Shan Temple was protected. They wouldn’t be able to reach the door. And soon the typhoon would have passed. He would begin the search through the wreckage immediately, turning it over brick by brick, and next time he would deal with them at once.

  He noticed something out of the corner of his eye. It was a speck in the window. At first he thought it was a bird. No. It was extraordinary. As the chairman watched, it grew larger and larger. It was heading towards him.

  It was a ship.

  Not a huge ship. A wooden samp
an, one of the Chinese sailing boats that were kept moored up in the harbour, to be photographed by tourists. The wind had grabbed it and torn it free. Even as the chairman watched, it was getting closer, rapidly filling up the window frame. He stood there, transfixed by the sight. He thought about running. Perhaps he could still make it to safety. But what was the point? How could he escape something that had been predicted so many years ago?

  He would die in an accident that involved a ship.

  He died now.

  The sampan was thrown at The Nail as if it were a paper dart that had been deliberately aimed. It smashed through the window on the sixty-sixth floor and into the man who stood behind it. At the same time, the wind howled in, scooping up the contents of the room and throwing them out, the files and papers rattling with a sound that was very like applause. The broken body of the chairman went with them, spun once in the air, then plunged down to the pavement below.

  Bloodstains on the carpet. A bottle of Cognac with its contents gurgling out. A scattering of broken glass. In the end, that was all that was left.

  There had been a bloody battle inside the Tai Shan Temple. All the bodies had been taken into one of the other chambers, but the evidence was still there in the bullet holes across the walls, rubble and scorch marks from a grenade, a puddle of blood in front of the main altar. One of the porcelain gods was standing with his arms outstretched, but his body now ended at his neck, which was jagged and hollow. His head was in pieces all around him. Another had lost a hand. It was as if they had tried to take part in the fight and had been crippled as a result.

  Jet and Sing had been on their own, waiting for Scarlett and the others to arrive. They had no idea how she had managed to cross Hong Kong – it would have been impossible now to leave the building – but they were glad to see her when she walked in. Jet had been wounded. He was holding a dressing against his neck, and his shirt was soaked in blood. Sing was still holding the sword stick that he had used to kill Audrey Cheng. He seemed to be unhurt.

  Neither of them had noticed that there was another man in the chamber, hiding underneath the altar. He was one of the chairman’s men and he had been shot twice. It was his blood that was pooling out. He knew he didn’t have very long. There was a gun inches from his outstretched hand.