Freefall

by Roderick Gordon

  There were a few seconds of astonished silence; then only Chester’s voice was heard.

  “That evens out the teams a little,” he said.

  “Very funny, fat boy,” Rebecca Two snarled through her clenched teeth. “When I get Topsoil again, I’ll be sure to pay your mum and dad a visit … in person.”

  “Uh … I … no …,” Chester gulped, the blood draining from his face.

  “We don’t have time for this,” Martha warned as she glanced upward, her face anxious. “Do it, Will. Do the exchange,” she urged him.

  “Are you sure?” Will asked her.

  “Yes,” she confirmed. “The Styx need me alive. I’ll be fine.”

  Will knew that none of them had much chance if they remained where they were, not with the Brights on the rampage.

  “All right, Rebecca Two,” he yelled. “Let my dad come over to me here, and Martha can come to you.”

  “No way. Martha stays exactly where she is. I’ll come to her,” Rebecca Two barked. “You can collect Dr. Buckwheat from here. Got that?”

  “How do I know you won’t just open fire on us?” Will asked.

  “Because we don’t have two rifles and a crossbow like you do, meathead,” Rebecca Two jeered.

  Checking that the remaining Limiter was sufficiently far away and not about to ambush them, Will nodded.

  “Right,” Rebecca Two announced. “Musical chairs. Let’s all begin walking — nice and slow.”

  Reluctantly, Will relinquished his grip on Rebecca One, who shook her head to straighten out her hair, then glowered at Will.

  He glowered back at her. “I should never have bothered to save your life,” he fumed.

  Knowing that he’d have to take Elliott with him, Chester was just turning to pick up the stretcher when something spun straight between his legs. A black canister. It rolled over the ground toward Dr. Burrows and Rebecca Two, but came to a stop in the middle of the cavern. Will recognized it immediately. It was one of the explosives Drake and Elliott used in the Deeps. But this was a seriously big one, the size of a can of paint.

  “It’s a twenty-pound charge — with a twenty-second fuse. And while I was at it, I primed all the others,” Elliott said quite calmly, throwing her rucksack on the ground beside her. She was sitting up on the stretcher, and looking very much herself again. During the standoff, she’d freed herself from her bindings, and everybody had been too preoccupied to notice as she’d retrieved her rucksack full of munitions from the end of her stretcher.

  Will and Chester stared at her, dumbstruck.

  “Sixteen seconds … BANG!” she said to them, throwing her arms out demonstratively.

  “No!” Will yelled, thinking that the fever must have loosened a couple of her screws. “Why’ve you done that?”

  “Because they’re planning to kill all of us, anyway. I heard them say so,” Elliott replied.

  Will exchanged glances with Chester and was just about to speak when the other boy beat him to it.

  “But … how can you know what they’re saying?”

  “Because I’m half Styx. My father was a Limiter. I can speak their language,” Elliott said. To prove the point she uttered a couple of nasal and completely unintelligible words.

  “Thirteen … almost twelve seconds,” Rebecca One translated.

  Elliott had the Rebecca twins’ undivided attention now.

  “Eleven seconds,” Elliott announced through a yawn.

  “Have you really set the explosives?” Will asked her, still unable to believe what was happening.

  Elliott nodded. “Ten seconds,” she said. And suddenly everyone was galvanized.

  Chester snatched up Elliott, and Martha yanked both of them, not toward the cavern but to the left of the submarine and in the direction of the alternative passage she’d indicated.

  Although Will had his rucksack on his back, he hesitated for a split second, debating whether to retrieve the other two that Rebecca One had discarded behind him. The memory of how he’d wandered the lava tubes in the Deeps without food or proper equipment was still painfully fresh in his mind, and there was no way he wanted a repeat of that. But there just wasn’t enough time, so instead he put his head down and thundered toward his father with all his might. He saw Bartleby pounce at him.

  “Geddoff!” Will bellowed, lashing out at him with the stock of his rifle. Possibly because he was confused and couldn’t understand why everyone was haring off in different directions, Bartleby’s attack lacked its usual intensity. The rifle struck him on the shoulder, and he yelped and curled into a ball as he was sent spinning away.

  Will kept on running. He was heading straight for Rebecca Two as she tore in the opposite direction toward the submarine. Rebecca One was already at the base of the conning tower with the Limiter, who was fighting off an attack from another Bright.

  By now, Dr. Burrows was up on his feet and yelling, “Will, stop that Rebecca! Get my tablets from her!”

  The urgency of his father’s shouts got through to Will, who aimed himself directly at Rebecca Two, knocking her to the ground.

  “Left-hand jacket pocket! Get my stone tablets!” Dr. Burrows yelled as Will stood over the dazed Styx girl. He immediately dug into her pocket and found a small bundle wrapped in a grimy handkerchief. As she was beginning to come to her senses and hit out at him, he didn’t try to search her further. There just wasn’t time.

  “GET OUT OF HERE!” Will yelled at his father, who showed no intention of moving to safety as he shouted back:

  “Did you get them? Did you get them?”

  Pounding toward Dr. Burrows, Will built up so much speed he was virtually airborne by the time he reached him. His momentum was enough to carry both of them not to the main tunnel, but toward a small passage at its side. Everything was happening so quickly that Dr. Burrows didn’t have any say in the matter as his son swept him away and out of the cavern.

  Will kept going. The countdown in his mind reached zero, then passed beyond it, but still nothing happened. He was beginning to ask himself if Elliott had actually set the fuses or whether it had all been a bluff when there was the most almighty explosion.

  The ground bucked under his feet as if he was in the midst of an earthquake.

  He and Dr. Burrows were flung on their fronts, pelted by a hailstorm of fungus pieces.

  Although the tremors were relatively short-lived and the ground settled down again, the sound of the explosion seemed to go on forever. Echoes reverberated from the walls of the void beyond the submarine. As the last report finally faded, Will moaned and began to stir. Pushing aside slabs of fungus, he rolled over and sat up. His ears were ringing, and he swallowed a couple of times until they felt more normal.

  “Dad,” he called, his voice sounding so small and remote. He staggered to his feet, blinking to clear his eyes of the stinging, stinking liquid. He shrugged off his rucksack, felt around for his lantern until he found it, then began to search for his father.

  There was no sign of him, and Will became increasingly worried until he spotted a boot sticking out from under a heap of fungus. Dr. Burrows was almost completely buried, but Will quickly hoisted him out. He knew his father wasn’t too badly hurt when he began to spit brown glop from his mouth, issuing a torrent of curses simultaneously. His glasses were missing, but he didn’t seem to be the slightest bit concerned about this.

  “Where are my tablets? Give me my tablets!” he demanded, blinking myopically at his son.

  “You mean these?” Will asked, wondering what was so vitally important about the bundle as he took it from his pocket and passed it to his father.

  Dr. Burrows fumbled it open and, one by one, felt the flat pieces of stone. “Thank goodness they’re all right. None of them are broken or lost. Well done, Will. Really well done!”

  “Good, no problem, Dad,” Will said, still at a loss to know why his father was showing more concern for some little pieces of stone than he was for anything else. More even than for Will.<
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  “Now where are my glasses?” Dr. Burrows said, and immediately began to crawl on all fours to locate them.

  “But, Dad, I can’t believe this!” Will gushed, as the realization sank home that against all odds they had been reunited. “We’re back together again! It’s so brilliant to see you when —”

  “Yes, but I can’t see anything!” Dr. Burrows snapped at him in a bad-tempered way, still looking for his glasses.

  Will hovered by his father for a moment, torn between staying with him or finding out if Chester and the others had escaped the explosion. “Dad, I’ll be back in a minute. I’ll help you find them then,” he told his father, not waiting for a response as he whisked around and began down the tunnel.

  Although it wasn’t very far to the entrance, the pieces of fungus made the going tricky. Due to the slick of oily fluid in the bottom of the tunnel, the larger slabs of fungus slid from under him as he climbed on top of them. And at one point the tunnel was completely obstructed and he was forced to clear away the debris with his bare hands before he could proceed. As he hefted sizeable chunks of fungus aside, he realized that it had probably saved their lives — not only had it absorbed the blast, but it had also cushioned their landings.

  When he finally reached the mouth of the tunnel, he was met by the strangest calm. He was just about to step out when he happened to glance down. He gasped, stopping himself in the nick of time. There was nothing before him but a huge gaping hole. The entire floor of the cavern had completely disappeared. Although he couldn’t see the bottom, the cavern walls were illuminated by the small fires, like candles in the niches of a church grotto.

  Dr. Burrows appeared beside his son, having retrieved his glasses. For a while they simply stared into the cavern, watching as rocks and pieces of fungus detached from the roof and dropped into the blackness. Then they heard a low grinding sound.

  “The submarine,” Will whispered, seeing it judder, then settle down again.

  “Submarine?” his father asked, as if he hadn’t appreciated what was there before.

  It was quite something to behold; fires burned all over the vessel and the fungus coating had been blasted away, so its streamlined hull was clearly visible. But something more was happening to it.

  A tremendous cracking sound made both Will and his father flinch. More grinding sounds followed. The submarine shook and dropped a small distance, then, as they watched, it seemed to be toppling sideways, but in slow motion.

  “It’s going! It’s falling!” Will exclaimed. The explosion had evidently destroyed either the fungus or the bedrock on which the hull had been lodged — or both — and now there was nothing to prevent the vessel from continuing on its way down.

  With a last tremendous groan, it tipped over, completely vanishing from view and leaving just the blackness of the void in its place. Will and his father heard distant crashing sounds as the sub collided with the sides as it descended.

  “I wonder if the Rebecca twins were on it,” Will said quietly. “They so had it coming.”

  Dr. Burrows fixed his eyes on his son. “You’re going to have some explaining to do, my boy,” he declared solemnly.

  “Huh?”

  “I just hope you know what you’ve done,” Dr. Burrows said, his voice grave as he waved his hand in the direction of the crater. He shook his head, his roughly cut hair, soused in fungus juice, sticking up in spikes as if he was some middle-aged punk rocker. He looked quite ridiculous.

  “You what?” Will spluttered. “I don’t know quite how we managed it, but we just got out of there alive … and you’re acting like some stupid schoolteacher. You have got to be joking!”

  “Of course I’m not joking,” Dr. Burrows retorted sharply. “You’re going to be in big trouble for your part in this.”

  That did it for Will — he began to snort, then burst into a full-bodied laugh. “Big trouble,” he repeated, his voice squeaking with incredulity. Catching his breath, he glanced at his father to make absolutely certain he was being serious.

  “That’s right,” Dr. Burrows confirmed. To his continuing surprise, his son dissolved into howls of even more uproarious laughter.

  “I’m in big trouble!” Unable to stop himself from laughing and going weak at the knees, Will looked for a place to sit down before he fell over. But the tears in his eyes were making it hard for him to see. He chose a particularly greasy piece of fungus and slid right off it. But this still didn’t stop him. Rolling on the ground, he continued to laugh so much he had to hold his sides.

  19

  AFTER A SHORT WHILE, Will’s laughter petered out and he fell into a sullen silence. Asking himself what he had found so funny, he ignored his father as he made several attempts to climb down from the mouth of the tunnel. The blast-damaged fungus simply peeled away in his hands as he tried to grip it. And even with the fungus removed, the rock beneath was slippery and treacherous due to the grease slopped over it.

  “This is hopeless,” he mumbled, staring over at the space where the submarine had been. He sucked in his breath as he caught a glimpse of a Bright streaking across the void, and thought how much it resembled a shooting star. “Make a wish,” he said forlornly. It seemed everything was stacked against him.

  Then he leaned as far as he could into the new crater, his lantern in his outstretched hand. If he had spotted an outcrop or ledge to jump to, he might have taken advantage of the low gravity and chanced it. But the crater appeared to be so deep, it would have been tantamount to leaping into the void itself.

  What now? he asked himself. He needed a way to reach Martha and the others. He was counting on them to have made it to the side passage she’d indicated. That’s unless their way had been blocked by a Bright.

  “Plan B … I need a Plan B,” he thought aloud, as he leaned out and peered along the cavern wall to his left. If he could somehow get across to the main tunnel through which they’d first entered the cavern, then he might be able to find his way back to the Wolf Caves. But this plan appeared to be equally impossible — aside from the fact that there was no way to climb the wall to reach it, he couldn’t even see where the entrance had been. The explosion had concealed it altogether. And in the back of his mind Will was also concerned that he might have another of his strange episodes. Perched on a ledge next to a sheer drop wasn’t exactly the best place for him to be right now.

  He shrugged. “Plan C, I suppose,” he mumbled under his breath. At the very best he had to try to communicate with Martha and Chester, even at the risk of attracting the Brights. He began to call out to them, pausing now and then to listen.

  Dr. Burrows didn’t offer any sort of help as he lingered at the mouth of the cave and watched his son. Indeed, Dr. Burrows wasn’t talking to him at all. Since Will was getting no response from his friends and his voice was becoming hoarse, he gave it up as a lost cause. Leaving his father, he turned and went back down the passage, clambering over the fungus until he came to where he’d left his rucksack. Hoisting it up, he went even deeper into the passage, in search of a clear area of ground. There, he’d begun to unpack his rucksack when he suddenly stopped.

  “The virus!” he burst out. With everything else going on, he’d completely forgotten that he’d had the phials on him through all the shenanigans with the Rebecca twins and the subsequent explosion. “Oh God, please don’t let them be broken,” he said quietly, as he slid the burlap package from the leather pouch. He sighed an enormous sigh of relief when he saw the phials were intact. Putting them away again, he continued to unpack his rucksack, taking an inventory of what he had left. There was a small amount of food, but not enough to last two people for more than a few days. In a side pouch he came across the bar of Caramac he’d taken from Cal’s body. Although Will had hidden it from Chester, he’d been planning to share it with him when there was something to celebrate.

  “Not today,” he said disconsolately, tossing the bar onto the pile of food.

  As for water, he had a full canteen on
his belt. At these temperatures it wouldn’t last terribly long, but he wasn’t too concerned, because Martha always seemed to find fresh sources wherever they’d gone. As he moved his hand away from his canteen, it encountered the cutlass still tucked in his belt. He drew it out and then slumped down on the ground, slapping the flat of the blade against his palm as he contemplated the situation.

  It didn’t look very promising.

  It may have been because of this, or because the adrenaline was wearing off, but he found himself overwhelmed by intense feelings of hopelessness and futility. Even if it was possible to get to the main tunnel again, he didn’t feel very confident that he’d be able to find his way back to the Wolf Caves. He knew that was where Martha would expect him to go. Then he thought about the shack. He shook his head. No, he’d never be able to remember the route, and in any case, the food would run out long before they reached it.

  His thoughts turned to Chester. He should have listened to his friend and not allowed himself to be won over by Rebecca One. He kicked himself for having been hoodwinked by her. Maybe Rebecca Two had been right when she said he was weak — maybe the twins would always triumph over him.

  Will’s roll call of self-recriminations didn’t end there; he shouldn’t have doubted Martha as he had, either. Yes, she had withheld information from them that proved vital in saving Elliott, but it was through a misguided desire to protect both him and Chester; and in the end she had led them safely to the submarine.

  As for Bartleby … even Will’s faithful companion had turned on him.

  And then there was Elliott. She was half Styx! He should have seen that one coming — the girl had all the skills and stealth of a Limiter. The more he thought about it, the more obvious it had been. She’d never actually said why she’d left the Colony, and though she’d talked about her mother, her father had never been mentioned. And she bore such a striking physical resemblance to the Styx: sinew-thin, yet so strong. Of course she had Styx blood in her.

  Somehow these deceits and revelations didn’t touch him as much as they should have. Maybe nothing could really touch him anymore — not after all he’d endured.