Freefall

by Roderick Gordon

  He’d made it this far!

  He took another quick look. The coast seemed clear. The twins were still on the other side of the hut, and there was absolutely no sign of the Limiter.

  He got to his feet, but remained in a half crouch as he stepped slowly to the jackets and lifted them off a rusty nail where they were hanging.

  He wondered if Elliott had managed to get to the top of the escarpment yet and was watching him through her telescopic sight. If so, what would she be thinking right now? Probably swearing like a sailor.

  He laid the jackets down on the frazzled grass and, kneeling beside them, quickly went through the pockets, pulling all their contents out. Bits of paper, luminescent orbs, some objects in small leather pouches that he decided to take in case they held the phials. He didn’t have time to open them, not there and then.

  Then, in an inner pocket, he found what he was looking for. The pocket had a flap over it with a snap closure. It made a tiny click as he undid it. He held his breath, waiting and listening for anything, but all he could hear was the murmur of occasional conversation between the Rebecca twins drifting over to him. He felt inside the pocket, and his fingers came across two small objects. He lifted them out. Wrapped in a square of camouflaged material, there were the phials, both of them. He couldn’t believe it. He heard the Rebeccas laughing. They wouldn’t be laughing much longer, not when they found out what he’d done. He put the phials carefully in his pocket, and went through the rest of the jackets just in case there were any more phials. He didn’t want to have done all this only to end up with more phony phials containing Ultra Bug specimens.

  He was finished. He felt light-headed, and his face was streaming with sweat as he began to crawl away.

  He’d gone about fifty feet, keeping carefully to his original route through the undergrowth, when he heard a shriek. He twisted his head around.

  Fear exploded in his mind.

  The Rebecca twin was standing where he’d left the jackets on the ground. Dripping with water, her face was pulled into a vile, angry mask, and she was looking straight at him.

  “You little creep!” she screamed, holding a scythe high in the air as if she was going to throw it. “This is it for you!”

  Will flipped over onto his back, whipping out his Sten. His finger was on the trigger. He felt no hesitation. It was as if he was seeing everything in monochrome. He had to do this. He didn’t know for sure if he’d got the genuine Dominion phials, so none of the Styx could be allowed to escape. If a single one of them got away, his job wasn’t finished.

  In his panic, Will began to fire before he was on target. Rounds sprayed wildly, hitting the corrugated metal of the hut and punching more holes in it. As he swung farther around, the twin seemed to go down.

  That was enough for Will.

  He was on his feet and running through the passage.

  He heard another shout.

  A man’s this time.

  Will snapped his head around.

  With a spear poised above his head, the Limiter was running like some sort of machine, pounding toward him in huge strides. The soldier shouted again, his words like a call from a bird of prey. They sounded so harsh it was as if they scored the hot air itself, leaving their marks in it.

  Will didn’t know how far down the passage he’d gone, but he couldn’t see the mouth yet. And he still hadn’t finished the job.

  He skidded to a halt, turning to aim at the Limiter.

  Everything was happening so fast it was a blur.

  Then there were two sounds that Will couldn’t understand. He heard a sharp crack! and at the same time, a swishing sound. On the top of his head, the Limiter’s black hair seemed to fluff up. He was flung face-first to the ground, his legs still running, as if the machine couldn’t stop.

  And as for the swishing sound … Will felt a sudden pain in his arm. His hand twitched, and he dropped the Sten.

  Then there was a flash of light, quickly followed by a second, and Will was lifted clean off his feet. Maybe it was the lower gravity, but he seemed to be whisked an incredible distance through the air, smashing through a cluster of thick bushes and tumbling over several times before he finally came to a stop.

  He tried to pull himself up, but his arm hurt too badly. He saw that it was covered in blood. All of a sudden, he felt very cold — he couldn’t understand why when the sun was still shining. The sun always shines here ran through his mind.

  He managed to prop himself up on one arm, and looked back to where he thought the passage was.

  Fifty feet behind him, all he could see were huge swirling sheets of fire and thick black smoke, the colors so vivid against the white rocks of the escarpment. “Cool,” he said, before he lost consciousness.

  He came to a little later. He lifted his head, noticing that there was a bandage on his arm.

  “You stupid idiot. Only an amateur could have attempted that and got away with it,” Elliott said, moving into his field of vision. “Next time, can we please stick to the plan?”

  Will looked at her blearily. “Oh great, I haven’t upset you again, have I? I always seem to do this with girls, I always say or do the wrong thi —”

  “Just shut up, Will,” Elliott said.

  He tried to move his arm again, but it was too painful. “What happened?” he asked.

  “The Limiter clipped you with his spear before I took him out. Sorry, couldn’t get him in my crosshairs quick enough,” she replied as she knelt beside Will, adjusting the bandage.

  “The Rebecca twins?”

  “I think you took care of one of them, and the other didn’t stand a chance. See for yourself.”

  Elliott helped him sit up. He recalled seeing smoke and flames before he’d passed out, but down by the escarpment a huge fire was now raging. A plume of smoke snaked above it, like the ones he and Dr. Burrows spotted through the binoculars from time to time in other parts of the jungle.

  “After I set off the charges with a shot, the passage collapsed in on itself, and the remaining twin was stuck inside. With all that dry stuff around, the whole place went up like a tinderbox. And even if you only winged the other twin, she was in there, too,” Elliott said. “There’s no way either of them could have made it out.”

  “So we did it?”

  Elliott nodded.

  “And you’re not angry with me,” Will asked, blinking at her.

  Elliott held up the two phials. “How can I be?” she replied, smiling broadly. Leaning forward, she kissed him on the cheek.

  Will smiled, too, the pain in his arm forgotten for the moment.

  39

  IN A SMALL terraced house in the Colony, Mrs. Burrows was propped up in a chair, her legs covered with a thick gray blanket. Her eyes were closed, and cushions had been placed on either side of her head, since she was unable to support it herself. Indeed, she had no control over any part of her body.

  In another chair, closer to the hearth where a fire burned, an elderly lady darned a sock as she chattered gently to herself.

  “It’s a crime what they pay policeman these days, partickly when ’e got his old mother, ’is sister, and now … now ’e’s got an invalid on ‘is back, too.” The elderly lady ceased her needlework and peered around at Mrs. Burrows. It wasn’t an unkindly look, but the old lady pressed her pale lips together with concern. “I told ‘im, I did, it’s all well and good playing the Samaritan, but it’s like ‘aving a new baby to care for, a big new baby that won’t never grow up. But ’e don’t listen…. I think ’e’s going soft in his old age.” The elderly lady turned back to her stitching. “I don’t know where this is all going to end. I don’t know ‘ow we’re going to make ends meet, I don’t, not on ‘is wages.”

  Because of the crackle of the fire, and because she was still nattering to herself, the elderly lady didn’t hear that Mrs. Burrows’s breathing had changed. It had become deep and forced, as if she was about to try something that, in her state, was a Herculean and almost impossible
feat. She maintained the deep breathing for several minutes, building herself up to the task. Then she stopped altogether, holding her breath as she strained.

  Like a wild animal in a winter-black cave, she was isolated and cut off from the outside world. Here the darkness was only broken by the odd sparkle as a thought or a desire or a memory coalesced for the briefest moment, then was gone almost the moment it had appeared.

  But now she had something she was determined to do. From somewhere the will to survive, to succeed, had emerged.

  She made the most immense effort.

  She strained even harder, still holding her breath. She managed to raise her right eyelid the tiniest degree, and to keep it raised. The chink of her exposed eye glittered and the light of the blaze registered on her retina, firing off the cells there. They generated minute electrical impulses that were conveyed up her optic nerve to her brain, which struggled to process them. Some of these signals did make it through to her cerebral cortex, and she vaguely sensed rather than saw the rosy glow in the room.

  But to her it was everything; it was something from outside her cave. She clung on to the sensation with animal instinct, and it gave her hope.

  Then, because the effort had been all too much and had drained every last ounce of energy from her body, the eyelid slid shut once again. Letting out her breath, she sank back into a deep slumber as the elderly lady, none the wiser for the miracle that had just taken place, continued to chatter to herself.

  Will and Elliott talked at length about what they should do with the phials. They even went as far as to consider whether they should attempt the journey back through the crystal belt so they could reach Topsoil and deliver the phials to Drake. But neither of them took this suggestion seriously, since they believed the chances of making it through were pretty slim. And the worst outcome would be if there was a mishap along the way in which the phials were damaged and the virus released. Dr. Burrows had warned them about the global system of air currents, saying that, although it might be one in a million, there was always the possibility that the virus could be carried up to the external world.

  They couldn’t risk this, so instead Will took it upon himself to search for a safe, secure place to bury the phials. His arm still in a sling but healing well, he’d left the camp on his own and was exploring a nearby tract of jungle when, out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw someone in the shadows cast by a grove of trees. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up, not only because he knew it couldn’t be his father or Elliott, but also because the figure looked so much like Uncle Tam.

  As he crept toward the trees, he realized that what he’d seen must have been a knot of creepers hanging from a lower branch and that there was no one there. Telling himself he must have conjured up the sighting because Tam had recently been so much in his thoughts, he investigated what lay behind the grove.

  He found a small spring bubbling up from between a few gray boulders, encircled by a ring of short-cropped grass. It was such a peaceful and secluded spot that it was here that he decided to bury the phials. He put some of the grass inside one of the medicine bottles he had taken from the submarine’s sick bay, then carefully lowered in the phials, packing more grass on top of them. After having dug a hole in the rich soil, Will made sure the lid of the bottle was tightly screwed on before burying it. Then he placed a few rounded stones on top to mark the spot and protect the phials from inquisitive animals.

  Following the discovery of the spring, he felt drawn to come back to it. Hardly a day passed when he didn’t visit it. The fresh water seemed to attract the most exquisite butterflies and dragonflies, which alighted on the lichen-speckled stones to cool themselves and to drink. It was paradoxical because he knew the Dominion virus, a lethal biological weapon, was buried there, which should have made it a place of death and destruction, but instead he found that the spring filled him with tranquility. It was somewhere he could lower his defenses and allow himself to remember the terrible events of the past. And begin to heal.

  On the other side of the spring from the Dominion virus and its small marker of stones, he made three larger piles of boulders. On each of these he erected a cross. Although their bodies weren’t there, he carved Uncle Tam, Sarah Jerome, and Cal’s names on these crosses. He found it a great comfort to sit in the grass by them, with the glorious display of colors from the butterflies flitting all around him. The Rebecca twins had finally been made to pay, and this felt like the end of a chapter to Will, a resolution. No longer was he living under their shadow, and no longer was he driven by the need for revenge. He felt liberated. He’d wiped the slate clean, and it allowed him to remember the family members he had lost at the hands of the Styx.

  One day when he was there, deep in thought, somebody cleared their throat behind him and made him jump.

  “I hope you don’t mind me coming here,” Elliott said. “I wanted to see for myself where you’d put the phials.”

  Will showed her, but she seemed more interested in the three memorials he’d erected for his family.

  “I didn’t know you’d done all this,” she said quietly. “I … um … it’s a … a nice idea.”

  Will nodded, and they didn’t speak for several moments as, together, they gazed at the crosses. For once, Elliott seemed incredibly unsure of herself. In a nervous gesture she swept back her jet-black hair from her face — since they’d left the Deeps, lice were no longer a problem and she’d stopped cutting it. Now it was almost shoulder length, and Will could barely recall what she’d looked like with closely cropped hair.

  “I’ve no idea if she’s dead or alive, but would it be OK if I built one of these for my mother?” Elliott asked.

  “Of course,” Will said, genuinely delighted. He suddenly thought of his own mother, his adopted mother Mrs. Burrows, and hoped that she hadn’t come to any harm. But, he reminded himself, at least Drake was there to look after her.

  And the next day when he arrived at the spring he found that Elliott had already set up a cross a little distance from his. She came and sat next to him. As Bartleby basked in a patch of sun filtered by the trees and took lazy mouthfuls of grass, Elliott began to open up to Will. There had been a feeling of camaraderie between the two of them after the incident with the Styx, but this was different. She talked about her childhood in the Colony and how she had been forced to leave when her mother had been blackmailed. And then she mentioned her father — the Limiter — and how she knew so little about him.

  All of a sudden, Elliott turned to Will. “Do you feel guilty about what we did to the Rebecca twins? Does it trouble you when you think about it?”

  The question was completely unexpected, and Will looked at her askance. “Yes, it does. I’m certain what we did was right, but it’s not something that you can get out of your head, is it?”

  “No,” she answered. “It never leaves you.”

  From beside the spring, Elliott chose two flat stones that had been worn smooth by the water. Taking one in each hand, she weighed them in her palms as if she was working out which of the two was the heaviest.

  “Can I ask you something?” Will ventured.

  “Sure,” Elliott shrugged.

  “That was a Limiter you shot, just like your dad,” Will said.

  He watched as Elliott absently tugged a third polished stone from the soil. Since her hands were already full with the other two stones, she eventually tossed it into the pool of spring-water. The splash made Bartleby roll over and sit up, as if he’d missed a fish leaping out of the stream or another unfortunate amphibian to chew on.

  “What if it had been your dad? Would you have been able to shoot him, too?” Will asked.

  “Never thought about it,” Elliott replied quickly. “My father’s dead and gone, so it’s never going to happen.”

  In a jam-packed pub in the heart of London’s Soho, a man in a heavy overcoat slouched by himself at a corner table. His hair was unkempt and his face ruddy. Obviously the worse for drink,
he clumsily examined his glass, discovering that it was empty. He mumbled something under his breath and banged the table with his fist, which sent the glass spinning to the floor, where it shattered. Then he lifted his head. “The Styx!” he spat, and began to shout, his words slurred and barely intelligible. “Sod them!”

  The low hum of conversation in the pub continued unabated — nobody appeared to take the slightest bit of notice of him. The man blearily regarded the throng: people having a quick drink after work before they made their way home.

  He sneered lopsidedly.

  “And sod the lot of you, too! You’re all blind to what’s going on!”

  Again nobody seemed to pay him any heed. Nobody except for a thin man with a sallow, hollow-cheeked face, who was suddenly at his table.

  “Pull yourself together, Drake. If you carry on like this, you’ll get yourself arrested. And you know what a night in the cells means,” the tall man warned in a low growl. He leaned closer to Drake so he couldn’t be overheard by those around them. “I helped you because I owed you a debt of honor for saving my daughter, but I’m not your fairy godmother. I might not be able to do it a second time.”

  Drake wiped the spittle from his lips with the back of his hand. “Sometimes I think Elliott saved me,” he drawled, his eyes heavy-lidded at he peered up at the former Limiter who had pulled him from the van that day back on Highfield Common.

  All at once Drake’s belligerence turned to despondency and his head sagged on his shoulders. “The White Necks have me beat at every turn. I let Celia down. I let Leatherman down. I let every one of them down. And, for all I know, the Styx still have the virus. I might as well just throw in the towel. I’m finished — we’re all finished.” He gave the thin man a desperate look. “What’s left for me? What can I do now?”

  “Oh, we’ll think of something,” the thin man said confidently as he helped Drake to his feet. “Now, let’s get you home.”

  40

  “I’VE HAD ENOUGH for today,” Will decided.