Freefall

by Roderick Gordon

  “Ever heard of the Illuminati?” Drake said.

  “Of course I have — the German secret society from the eighteenth century,” Dr. Burrows answered with great authority, throwing a sidelong glance at his son to see if he was impressed.

  “You got it — the Illuminati were founded by Adam Weishaupt in 1776 in Bavaria,” Drake said, then inhaled deeply. “Well, I suppose you might say we have vague parallels with them. We’re a clandestine network of scientists, military personnel, and a handful of people in senior government. But unlike the Illuminati, we didn’t come together for sinister purposes — far from it. We have a common and single goal: to try to fight the Styx any way we can.”

  “That doesn’t help me very much.”

  Drake gave Dr. Burrows a wink and lowered his voice to a theatrical whisper. “It’s not meant to.”

  29

  THE LAUNCH was carried along at steady speed by the river, needing little assistance from the outboard motor, except when Will blipped the throttle to keep them to the middle of the channel. And although Dr. Burrows had taken up position at the bow, Will now had the use of his headset again and didn’t really need any guidance on what lay ahead.

  They sailed straight past the first refueling station, but stopped at the second one to dry themselves out and get some rest. They had something to eat, choosing a curry from the impressive selection of lightweight rations Drake had provided for them.

  As they lounged around after the meal, warming their hands by the oil stove, Will turned to his father.

  “Once we got Topsoil, you didn’t have any intention of bringing me back here, did you?” he accused him. “You were going to dump me on Mum so I wasn’t around your neck. In fact, that’s the only reason you wanted to go home, isn’t it? You wanted me off your hands. You lied to me, plain and simple. It’s that white mice thing again, isn’t it?”

  Dr. Burrows closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them again. “It was for your own good, Will. I was trying to do what was best for you.”

  Will gave his father a withering look. “And yesterday you were more interested in working on your precious tablets than seeing poor old Mum. You don’t care about her at all anymore, do you?”

  “How can I put this, Will?” Dr. Burrows’s voice was strained as he tried to explain himself. “It’s a bit like my job in the museum. I had to do it because I needed to bring in enough money to keep us all afloat, but it was never me. All the time I knew I could do something better … something exceptional. And sometimes relationships — marriages — are the same. People stay with what they’ve got, although, underneath, they’re not really happy. I’m sorry to say that your mother and I had grown apart. You must have seen it.”

  “But it doesn’t need to be like that,” Will threw back at him, becoming very upset. “You don’t just give up. You didn’t try hard enough!”

  “I’m trying right now,” Dr. Burrows replied. “I’m trying to do something to make people proud of me. I’m trying to make you proud of me.”

  “Don’t bother,” Will grunted disdainfully, pulling his jacket collar up around his neck and crossing his arms over his chest.

  They both slept, and barely spoke to each other as they climbed back into the launch to continue their journey. Again they skipped a refueling point, knowing that if they made a push for it and kept going, they should arrive back in the underground harbor in under twenty-four hours.

  And so, after a day and a half of traveling, the barrier across the channel that housed the hydroelectric turbines loomed in front of them. Will was at the prow but, due to his fatigue, he wasn’t as alert as he should have been. He only spotted it at the last moment, shouting a warning to his father. It didn’t give Dr. Burrows much time to maneuver. He had to open the throttle fully in order to power them around the corner and into the harbor. He clipped the wall of the archway as he went, splintering the top of the hull. But the damage wasn’t serious and, now in calm waters, he finally cut the engine and they coasted slowly toward the pier.

  The brightness of the overhead lights making him squint, Will grabbed hold of a bollard, then leaped from the boat and onto the pier in a single effortless bound.

  “Bet you’re happier now that you’ve got your superpowers back,” Dr. Burrows laughed, trying his best to relieve the tension between them. “Let’s unload all the kit, and then get ourselves dry.”

  “Dad,” Will began, as he squatted at the side of the pier. He might still be angry with his father, but he knew he had to get along with him if they were going to achieve anything. “We’ve come all this way again, but we don’t really have any sort of plan, do we?”

  “Sure we do. I’ve got a set of directions that are almost complete,” Dr. Burrows countered.

  “But you still don’t have any idea where the map starts from.”

  “The tablets say the route begins in the place with the falling sea, and by the single stone, if my translation is accurate. And that’s likely to be somewhere near the sub, because I believe that ‘single stone’ could be the one in the submariner’s photograph. And also, you think brine — seawater — is falling down the inside of the void. Sounds promising to me.”

  “Fine, but the submarine’s not there anymore, now that Elliott’s blown a big part of the void to smithereens, and before I do anything else, I’m going to find my friends. And then I need to make sure the Rebecca twins and the Limiter are out of action.”

  Dr. Burrows looked up at Will on the pier and took a deep breath. “Then we’ve got an awful lot to do,” he said.

  Drake held back at the bottom of the steps as Mrs. Burrows knocked on Ben Wilbrahams’s front door. He answered, wearing a silk robe and slippers.

  “Celia!” he said with surprise. He moved his glasses from where they were resting on the top of his head and put them on properly. “I didn’t expect to … see …” His voice petered out as his eyes fell on Drake, who was staring coldly at him from the pavement.

  “Let’s just drop the pleasantries,” Mrs. Burrows said, her voice uncompromising. She thrust her hands into her leather jacket and turned her head to regard the street, curling her lip with disdain. She didn’t bother to look at Ben Wilbrahams as she spoke, as if the sight of him was distasteful to her. “Tell your friends we have something they want. We have information about the twins and the virus they had with them.”

  “My friends? The virus?” Ben Wilbrahams asked.

  “I’m not in the mood to dance with you!” Mrs. Burrows barked, only now turning to look at him. “So don’t waste my time. You know precisely what I’m talking about. I’m prepared to make a deal with the Styx. Tell them they can have Dominion and the twins, but in return they’re to leave me and my family alone. And I’ll only do a deal with someone who can give me the right assurances, so I want a parley with their Mr. Big.”

  Ben Wilbrahams blinked, but didn’t say a word.

  “I know precisely what the gray-haired Styx looks like, so tell them not to try to dupe us with some dodgy stand-in,” Drake added. It was an outright lie, because he’d only seen the old Styx at a great distance, when he was issuing orders by the edge of the Pore. “And they need to get their skates on. In forty-eight hours we put the twins out of their misery and incinerate the virus.”

  Drake held up the two phials so Ben Wilbrahams could see them, then slipped them back into his pocket.

  “If the answer’s yes,” Mrs. Burrows said, pointing to his brass door knocker, “tie your wig to that. We’ll see it and contact you to arrange where and when.”

  Ben Wilbrahams automatically put his hand to the back of his head. “How did you kn —?”

  “Oh, come on, I’ve seen better rugs down at the local flea market,” she sneered, then spun on her heel and descended the steps. As she and Drake walked away, she called back, “Remember — they’ve got forty-eight hours to get their act together.”

  Drake glanced at her as they drove back to the safe house.

  “We didn�
��t rehearse half of what you said to Wilbrahams, but that was perfect. I couldn’t have done better myself,” he congratulated her. “Where did you learn to handle yourself like that?”

  “Oh, here and there,” she shrugged, peering at a shop window full of televisions as they sped past. “But don’t you think this is sailing a bit close to the wind? Now that we’ve stirred up the hornets’ nest, won’t they just come at us with all they’ve got?”

  “Sure they will, but if we can draw their Mr. Big — as you called him — out into the open and nab him, that gives us a bargaining chip. At the moment we’re playing with an empty hand — we don’t have the Dominion virus or the twins, but —”

  “But they don’t know that,” Mrs. Burrows cut in. “And what happens if they don’t want to meet us?”

  “Then it will tell us they’ve already got the virus and don’t need us. Which is the real point of the exercise, because then we’ll know we’re in trouble, serious trouble.”

  “I’m with you,” Mrs. Burrows said, “but in the meantime I’m the shark bait — or should that be Styx bait?”

  30

  “DRAKE, IT’S ME. I just want you to know we’ve reached the deep-level shelter,” Will said into the black telephone in the radio operator’s booth. As he stopped speaking, he heard a crackle in the earpiece, but otherwise there was just silence. “And please can you tell Mum …” Will’s voice became uneven, and he swallowed hard. “Tell Mum I love her all the world and that I’ll see her soon.” Just as he was replacing the receiver, Dr. Burrows poked his head around the door.

  “I thought I heard you talking to someone,” he said. “What’s going on?”

  “I left a message for Drake,” Will replied.

  Dr. Burrows looked disappointed. “You realize that man’s just using us — all of us — don’t you? He’s got you scampering around after the twins and the Dominion phials, and who knows what he’s going to get Celia to do for him. He just uses people for his own questionable ends.”

  “Drake’s my friend. And if it wasn’t for him you’d be dead by now,” Will snapped, ending the exchange.

  They spent the next twelve hours sorting out their equipment and getting some sleep. When they were finally ready to go, Will and Dr. Burrows pulled the massive door shut behind them, then stopped by the electrical panel.

  Will watched the minute flicking of the needle on the main dial as his father reached for the first of the switches and swung it upward. He did the same for the others, and the harbor was once again returned to darkness.

  “Do we really need to power it down?” Will asked.

  “Always leave a place as you’d wish to find it,” Dr. Burrows replied. “You never know when you might need it again.”

  As they stood side by side in the pitch-black, the luminescent orb in Will’s Styx Lantern stirred to life, growing in radiance until the sublime green light was pouring through the lens.

  “Here we go again,” Will said under his breath as he shone the beam on the back of his hand.

  As they exited the concrete building and set off down the quay, they both had the large Bergens on their backs, which held considerably more kit than the civilian ones they’d been toting around before. And despite the fact that Will was lugging two of these rucksacks, one hooked over each shoulder, and also the sizeable holdall, his rifle, and the Sten gun, the lower gravitational pull meant it felt as if he was carrying nothing more than a bag of feathers.

  As he thought about this, he turned to his father. “I’ve got that sick feeling again.”

  “Yes, I noticed you were looking a bit green around the gills. I’ve got it, too, just like when I came down the Pore the first time. Nothing to be concerned about — it’s because your gut relies on normal gravitational pull to assist it with peristalsis, the mechanism by which the muscles in your duodenum ripple and move your chewed-up food down your —”

  “Dad, please, I said I feel sick!” Will moaned, holding a hand to his mouth.

  As they went into the narrow crevasse, Will planted the first of Drake’s radio beacons, lodging it in a crevice high up on the wall.

  “Bread crumb number one,” he said.

  It was late morning and the light streamed into the empty room. Mrs. Burrows was in the middle of her yoga routine when she heard Drake calling her from downstairs. She’d been missing her almost daily visits to the gym and so this was the best she could do, exercising on the floor of one of the bedrooms in the shuttered hotel that Drake was using as a safe house for the time being. Grabbing her towel and bottle of water, she went out into the corridor and hurried down the flight of stairs where Drake and Leatherman were waiting. The hotel lobby was still intact, with a reception desk and a few tables and chairs arranged around the place. Drake and Leatherman were standing just inside the main doorway.

  “Hi, guys,” Mrs. Burrows greeted them. “What’s up?”

  “Baldy Wilbrahams just left his hairpiece on the door knocker,” Leatherman said with a straight face.

  “He didn’t!” Mrs. Burrows said disbelievingly, then burst into a raucous laugh, Drake and Leatherman joining in with her.

  Drake held out a cell phone to her. “Then it’s all systems go. You need to call him with the time and place,” he said quietly.

  Mrs. Burrows stopped laughing as she took the phone.

  As Martha pounded on the door to the barricade of the Wolf Caves, Chester stirred on the soft patch of ground where he’d been snoozing. He groaned and heaved himself to his feet, then rubbed his back and groaned again. Wiping the side of his face that had been resting in the dirt and scooping his long hair back, he grumbled, “I’m a caveman” to himself as he went to the entrance. He slid out the crossbar from behind the door so Martha could come in. The first thing he spotted was Bartleby lolloping around behind her.

  “Keep that mangy moggy away from me,” he said in a bad-tempered voice.

  Then he noticed Martha was grinning from ear to ear.

  “We hit the jackpot,” she announced gaily.

  He saw what was on the ground beside her and took a step back.

  “Urhhhhh!”

  Steam rose from a dark, matted fleece. It was hard to make out precisely what it was — it looked rather like someone had discarded an old furry rug there, until Chester caught sight of the thick snout protruding from it.

  “That’s a wolf?”

  “Sure is,” Martha said. “Caught it in one of my snares. A real brute — took three shots to the back of the head to kill it.”

  “Three shots,” Chester repeated, not really knowing what he was saying as Martha stooped to take hold of a hind leg and began to drag the dead wolf past him.

  Chester watched her, nodding his head. “I am a caveman,” he sighed in quiet acquiescence, and was about to shut and secure the door again when he remembered Bartleby was still outside. The cat’s big platelike eyes were fixed nervously on Chester — the animal knew he was still out of the boy’s good graces.

  With a resentful grunt, Chester waved the cat inside. Bartleby got the message, skulking warily past him, then bounding off into the caves after Martha.

  Chester, too, followed after Martha, and found that she wasn’t where he expected her to be, in the area with the soft dirt floor that they usually occupied. When he finally caught up with her farther inside the complex, she was already preparing the carcass, and Elliott was watching her raptly.

  Martha cut one of the wolf’s eyeballs from its socket, made a small incision in it, then put it to her mouth. She squeezed it hard, the fluid from the eyeball dribbling down her whiskery chin as she drank it.

  “Gah!” Chester gagged.

  Martha then proceeded to hack the second eyeball out. She also gave it a jab with her knife, but this time passed it to Elliott.

  “Good source of fluid,” Martha advised Elliott as the girl drank hers.

  “Ohhh!” Chester moaned, sitting down suddenly.

  “That’s good,” Elliott said, then gl
anced at Chester. “You must try some next time.”

  Chester made another gurgling sound, at which Elliott started laughing. It took him a few seconds, but then Chester saw the funny side of it, too. He shook his head as Elliott turned her full attention to Martha, watching how she was gutting the large beast.

  Elliott’s recovery had been nothing short of a miracle. The antibiotics had done the trick and she almost appeared to be back to her old self. Although not quite her old self. There was something different about her. Compared to the taciturn Elliott of the Deeps, Chester had noticed that she was now more forthcoming and even, at times, lighthearted.

  Perhaps, as Rebecca One had warned might be the case, the fever had “cooked her brains.” But Chester liked to think it was because Elliott was just grateful that he, Will, and Martha had pulled out all the stops and saved her life. Whatever the reason, she made the long days cooped up in the Wolf Caves bearable for Chester as they chatted together and played tic-tac-toe in the dirt by scratching it with sticks.

  Elliott also talked to Martha for hours, evidently trying to soak up as much local knowledge as she could. She had insisted that Martha show her how to prepare spider-monkeys for cooking, and became so adept at this that she took over the task each time Martha returned from one of her hunting trips. And now she was learning how to prepare a cave wolf.

  There was the most horrific tearing noise as Martha yanked a forelock from the dead beast and blood pumped in little spurts from its torso.

  “Martha, why did you come all the way down here?” Chester asked as he turned his head away and instead looked around the unfamiliar part of the cave.

  “Because the smell will attract other wolves … and the spiders,” Elliott answered, taking the severed limb from Martha and placing it on a flat rock. “And if you want to make yourself useful, why don’t you get a fire going for us?”

  “Sure,” Chester said.