Freefall

by Roderick Gordon

  “Don’t you feel the, um, weightlessness?” Will said, grasping for the right word. “It’s low gravity. My guess is that it’s about a third of what we’re used to on the surface,” Will informed him, pointing a finger heavenward. “That — and the soft landing we had on this fungus — might explain why we’re not as flat as pancakes right now. But be careful how you move around or you’ll send yourself spinning off this shelf and back into the Pore again.”

  “Low gravity,” Chester repeated, trying to absorb what his friend was saying. “What does that mean, exactly?”

  “It means we must have fallen a very long way.”

  Chester looked at him uncomprehendingly.

  “Ever wondered what’s at the center of the earth?” Will said.

  2

  AS DRAKE STOLE along the lava tunnel, he thought he heard a noise and froze, listening intently. “Nothing,” he said to himself after a moment, then unhooked his canteen from his belt to take a drink. He swallowed contemplatively, his eyes peering at the gloom of the tunnel as he began to reflect on what had happened at the Pore.

  He’d left before the old Styx had ordered the Limiters to jump to their deaths, but had witnessed the horrific events leading up to it. Hidden on the slope above the Pore, he’d been powerless to prevent Cal from meeting a sudden and violent end. Will’s younger brother had been brutally gunned down by the Styx soldiers after he’d panicked and stepped out into the line of fire. And minutes later, Drake had been equally powerless to save Will and the rest of them when complete chaos erupted. He could only watch as the large-bore guns of the Styx Division opened up, and Elliott, Will, and Chester were blasted over the side of the Pore.

  Drake had been through so much with Elliott in the Deeps that he could usually second-guess how she’d act in any given situation. And as bad as things looked, Drake had still retained a sliver of hope that somehow she had managed to anchor herself and the boys to the side of the colossal opening, that they hadn’t actually dropped down it. So Drake had remained where he was, rather than do what his instincts were telling him and get away from the area, which was swarming with Styx and their savage attack dogs.

  As Limiters searched the perimeter of the Pore, he’d listened out, hoping to catch the reports as Elliott and the boys were located and hauled back up. At least if they were captured, he would have an opportunity to try to free them later on.

  But as the minutes ticked by and the search down by the Pore continued, he’d become increasingly disheartened. He had to accept that Elliott and the boys were gone for good, that they had fallen to their deaths. Of course, there was a decades-old story about a man who had stumbled into the Pore and miraculously reappeared at the Miners’ Station, babbling about fantastic lands, but Drake had never believed a word of it. He’d always dismissed it as a rumor manufactured by the Styx to give the Colonists something to think about. No, as far as he was concerned, nobody survived the Pore.

  He was also becoming increasingly concerned that he’d be detected by the Styx dogs, known as stalkers — vicious brutes whose fierceness was surpassed only by their prowess at tracking. They hadn’t yet picked up his scent trail because of the clouds of smoke left over from the recent gun barrage. But the wind was rapidly dispersing the smoke and wouldn’t afford him protection from the dogs for very much longer.

  He’d just been debating whether he should leave when he’d heard a commotion. Jumping to the conclusion that Elliott and the boys had been spotted, he’d immediately raised himself up on his elbows and peered around the menhir he’d hidden behind. The number of soldiers with unshielded lanterns in the area allowed him a clear view of the reason for all the activity.

  Down by the Pore he caught the briefest glimpse of someone in full flight, their arms outstretched on either side.

  “Sarah?” he’d said under his breath.

  It had certainly looked like Will’s mother, Sarah Jerome, but he couldn’t begin to understand how she’d managed to get to her feet and, far less, how she was able to run. Her injuries had been so severe that he truly would have thought she’d be dead by now.

  But from the glimpse he got, she appeared to be very much alive as she tore over the uneven ground. Drake had watched as the Styx reacted, running toward her as they brought up their rifles. But no shots had been fired as Sarah swept two small figures over the edge of the Pore with her. She and the figures had simply vanished from sight.

  “Holy smokes …,” he said under his breath as he’d heard high-pitched screams, assuming instantly that they had been Sarah’s.

  Other shouts — the shouts of Styx soldiers — rang out all across the slope and, as footsteps passed within plain sight of where he was standing, Drake had quickly tucked himself back behind the menhir. But he hadn’t been able to resist a second look.

  All the soldiers in the area had gathered around the spot where Sarah had jumped. A single Styx had stepped up onto a chunk of masonry and had begun shouting rapid orders at the soldiers milling around him. He’d appeared to be older than the rest of the troops and was dressed in the usual black coat and white shirt, rather than the Limiter combats. Drake had seen him around in the Colony before — he was clearly someone at the very top of their hierarchy, someone very important. And with the ease of someone used to issuing orders, he quickly and efficiently organized the soldiers into two groups — one to check the Pore, the other to comb the slope with stalkers.

  Drake had realized it was time to make himself scarce.

  Getting to the top of the slope undetected hadn’t been difficult, and then he’d made his way out of the cavern. Once in the lava tubes, he’d moved cautiously, not least because he only had stove guns — very basic firearms.

  But now, as he took a final sip from his canteen and replaced the lid, his mind was processing what he’d witnessed at the Pore. “Sarah,” he said out loud, as he thought about how she’d taken the two Styx with her to the grave.

  Then it clicked.

  The high-pitched screams he’d heard weren’t Sarah’s at all.

  The screams had been those of young girls. The twins! Sarah had taken her revenge on the Rebecca twins! Knowing she probably had only minutes to live, and that her two sons had already met their fate, Sarah had found the perfect focus for her retribution.

  That was it!

  She had sacrificed herself to eliminate the twins.

  And Drake knew that the twins had had the lethal Dominion virus on them, since they’d been parading it around and taunting Will with it. They’d told Will of their plan to unleash it on Topsoilers and implied that the single phial of Dominion was all they needed. According to Sarah, one of the twins had been handed the freshly replicated virus as she’d arrived in the Deeps. Drake was willing to bet that the phial was the only specimen the Styx had in their possession. So, possibly without knowing it, Sarah had just exacted her vengeance on what was most dear to the Styx, and had foiled their plot against Topsoilers.

  It was perfect!

  She’d achieved precisely what Drake had thought near impossible.

  Shaking his head, he took a single step, but jerked to a stop as if a current had been passed through him.

  “What a fool I am!” he exclaimed. He’d completely overlooked something. It wasn’t quite the perfect solution he’d first thought. Sarah had started the job, but it wasn’t finished yet.

  “The Bunker,” he murmured, realizing that traces of the virus could still be present in the sealed test cells in the midst of the huge concrete complex. The Styx had tested the effectiveness of the virulent strain on a handful of unfortunate Colonists and renegades, and their dead bodies might still contain living virus. The Styx would know that, too, he realized. He would have to get there first, to destroy what was left.

  Drake began to run, formulating a plan of action as he went. He could pick up some explosives from a secret cache on the way to the Bunker. It was likely there would still be Styx patrolling the Great Plain, but he had to get to the
cells as quickly as he could. He was going to have to cut some corners — this was no time for subtlety.

  Too much was at stake for that.

  In the corridor of Humphrey House, Mrs. Burrows dithered, unable to make up her mind. The part of her that craved television just didn’t seem to burn with its usual intensity that Saturday afternoon. She knew there was something she wanted to watch, but she couldn’t quite recall what it was. She found this vaguely disquieting — it really wasn’t like her to forget.

  Shaking her head, she took a few shuffling steps across the green, overwaxed linoleum in the direction of the dayroom, where the only TV in the place was to be found.

  “No,” she said, stopping.

  As she listened to the voices and the activity coming from different parts of the building, echoing and indefinite like sounds heard at a public swimming pool, she suddenly felt so very alone. Here she was in this impersonal building, with its professional staff and an assortment of troubled people, but nobody really cared about her. Of course, the staff had a clinical interest in her well-being, but they were strangers to her, just as she was to them. She was merely another patient to be sent on her way when they decided she had recovered, another bed to be vacated for the next inmate.

  “No!” She thrust her clenched fist into the air. “I’m better than that!” she proclaimed loudly as an orderly marched briskly past her. He didn’t even give her a second glance — people speaking to themselves were the norm in this place.

  She swiveled on the worn heels of her slippers and scuffed down the corridor, away from the dayroom, as she fished in her bathrobe pocket for the card the policeman had given her. It had been three days since the last meeting with him, and it was about time he came up with something definitive. As she reached the phone booth, she flexed the flimsy piece of card with its cheap printing. “Detective Inspector Rob Blakemore,” she murmured.

  For a second she thought about the unidentified woman who had come to see her some months before. The woman had pretended to be from social services, but Mrs. Burrows had seen through the deception and worked out who she really was: Will’s biological mother. And she had accused Will of murdering her brother! But this rather far-fetched claim, whether true or not, wasn’t Mrs. Burrows’s main concern. She was more preoccupied by two other aspects: She couldn’t understand why the woman had waited until now to make herself known — waited until after Will had “gone walkabout.” And she couldn’t help but be impressed by the passion the woman had shown. To describe her as driven would be a rank understatement.

  In the end, it was this that had shaken Mrs. Burrows from her safe, lazy world, like a blast of cold wind from an unknown country. In those brief moments with Will’s biological mother, she had had a glimpse of something far removed from the secondhand life that the television provided her with … something so real, so immediate, and so irresistible.

  She slotted her credit card into the phone and dialed the number.

  As it was the weekend, DI Blakemore was, predictably enough, not in the office. Despite this, Mrs. Burrows left a long and rambling message with the poor girl unfortunate enough to answer her call.

  “Highfield Police Station. How can I h —?”

  “Yes, this is Celia Burrows, and DI Blakemore said he’d get back to me on Friday and he hasn’t, so I want him to call me without fail on Monday because he said he was going to review the piece of security camera footage he took away with him and try to lift a decent photo of the woman’s face, from which he was going to get an artist’s impression that he could distribute on the police intranet in the hope that someone might be able to identify her, and he also wanted to think about some media coverage and how that might help, and by the way, if you didn’t catch it the first time, my name is Celia Burrows. Good-bye.”

  Having hardly drawn breath or given the girl an opportunity to say a single word in response, Mrs. Burrows slammed down the receiver. “Good,” she congratulated herself, and went to extract her credit card. However, she paused in thought for a second, then dialed her sister’s number.

  “It’s ringing!” Mrs. Burrows said. That in itself was a breakthrough because the number had been unobtainable for several months, which had probably meant that her sister had overlooked her phone bill yet again.

  The phone continued to ring, but there was still no answer.

  “Pick up, Jean, pick up!” Mrs. Burrows shouted into the receiver. “Where are y —?”

  “‘Allo,” answered a disgruntled voice. “Who’s there?”

  “Jean?” Mrs. Burrows asked.

  “Don’t know anyone called Jane. You got the wrong number,” Auntie Jean said. Mrs. Burrows could hear a munching sound, as if her sister was eating a piece of toast.

  “Just listen to me, this is C —”

  “I don’t know what you’re selling, but I don’t need none!”

  “Noooooo!” Mrs. Burrows shouted as her sister hung up on her. She held the telephone away from her head and fumed at it. “You silly cow, Jean!” She was just about to redial when she spotted the rake-thin form of the matron bustling down the corridor.

  Mrs. Burrows replaced the receiver, whipped her credit card from the slot, then stepped in front of the gray-haired woman. On the spur of the moment she’d decided what she had to do.

  “I’m leaving.”

  “Oh, yes? Why’s that?” the matron asked. “Because of Mrs. L’s death?”

  Uncharacteristically for Mrs. Burrows, she seemed at a loss for words. She opened her mouth but didn’t speak as she remembered the patient who had contracted the Ultra Bug, a mystery virus that had swept through the country and then the rest of the world. But whereas most people were laid low for a week or two with chronic eye and mouth infections, the virus had somehow got into Mrs. L’s brain. And killed her.

  “Yes, I suppose that’s probably part of the reason,” she admitted. “When she died so abruptly, it did make me realize how valuable life is, and how much I’ve been missing out on,” she said finally.

  The matron inclined her head sympathetically.

  “And after all these months with still no news of my husband or son, I’ve been forgetting that there’s one member of my family left — my daughter, Rebecca,” Mrs. Burrows continued. “She’s staying at my sister’s, you know, and I haven’t as much as spoken to her since I’ve been here. I feel that I should be with her. She probably needs me right now.”

  “I understand, Celia.” Nodding, the matron smiled at her, adjusting her wiry gray hair, which was gathered into an immaculately arranged bun.

  Mrs. Burrows smiled back. What the matron didn’t need to know was that over her dead body would Mrs. Burrows leave it entirely to the police to find her missing husband and son. She was convinced that the unidentified woman who had come to see her was the key to what was going on, and might even be Will’s abductor. The police kept telling Mrs. Burrows they were “on the case” and “doing everything they could,” but she was determined to begin her own investigation as well. And she couldn’t do that in here, with just a public pay phone at her disposal.

  “You know it’s my job to advise you to speak to your counselor before you leave, but …,” said the matron, glancing at her wristwatch, “that wouldn’t be until Monday, and I can see you’ve made up your mind. I’ll get the release forms from my office right now for you to sign.” She turned to go down the corridor, then paused. “I have to say I’m going to miss our little chats, Celia.”

  “Me, too,” Mrs. Burrows replied. “Maybe I’ll come back one day.”

  “I hope not, for your sake,” the matron said, continuing on her way.

  “We’ve got to find Elliott,” Chester said as he took a few reluctant steps.

  “Hold on a second.” Will started to lift an arm and then made a noise, as if he was in great pain. “What is it?” Chester asked.

  “My arms, shoulders, hands,” Will complained. “Everything hurts.”

  “Tell me about it,” Chester s
aid, as his friend managed to raise his arm all the way to his neck with another stifled moan.

  “I want to see if this still works.” Will began to untangle the night-vision device, which had been pushed down around his neck during the fall.

  “Drake’s lens?” Chester said.

  “Drake!” Will gasped, immediately stopping what he was doing. “Remember what the Rebeccas said — do you think they were telling the truth, for once?”

  “What … that it wasn’t him you shot?” Chester asked hesitantly. It was the first time he had spoken to Will about the shooting on the Great Plain, and he felt distinctively uneasy now that he had.

  “Chester, whoever it was that the Limiters were torturing, I honestly think I missed him by a mile.”

  “Oh,” Chester mumbled.

  Will looked thoughtful. “If they had caught or killed Drake, the Rebeccas would have rubbed my face in it,” he reasoned.

  Chester gave a small shrug. “Maybe he didn’t escape them, and they’ve got him somewhere. Maybe it was just another of their nasty little lies.”

  “No, I don’t think so,” Will said, his eyes bright with hope. “What could they get from lying about that?” He looked at Chester. “So, if Drake did survive the ambush … and somehow got away from the Limiters … I wonder where he is now.”

  “Maybe he’s holed up somewhere on the Great Plain?” Chester suggested.

  “Or maybe he went Topsoil. Don’t ask me why, but I got the feeling he could go to the surface anytime he wanted.”

  “Well, wherever he is, we could really do with his help now.” Chester sighed as he scanned the darkness. “I wish he was down here with us.”

  “I wouldn’t wish that on anyone,” Will declared earnestly grunting as he worked the device up over his face. He positioned the strap across his forehead and tightened it, then adjusted the flip-down lens so it was directly over his right eye. He found that the cable had come unplugged from the small rectangular unit in his pants pocket, and made sure it was connected again before turning on the device. “So far, so good,” he exhaled as the lens began to glow with a muted orange iridescence.