Road to Abaddon

by Vincent Heeringa

  Everybody needs a spot of luck and for once, it fell the children’s way. The gun that Jonah kicked from the Metrician’s hand clattered across the floor and slid directly to Nassim.

  She swooped it up, rolled onto her belly, and shot Matilda’s guard in the chest. Then she yelled “duck!” to Jonah and fired at the soldier standing behind him.

  By now, Grace was rounding on Nassim, fumbling for her second pistol. But Nassim spun around and kicked Grace’s feet from beneath her. She tumbled and knocked her head hard on the concrete floor, making a sickening thwack. She was knocked out cold.

  The hall was a cacophony of battle sounds, with mutants and Metricians and children and guards facing off in hand-to-hand combat. Amidst the chaos, Jonah jumped over Grace and landed in front of Nassim.

  “You’re alive!” he exclaimed.

  “Did you expect anything else, you dummy,” she laughed and, in a gesture that surprised them both, she put her hands on his shoulders and kissed him quickly on the lips.

  “Now I need to get Wadid,” she said and pushed him away again and ran back into the melee. For his part Wadid was wrestling a Metrician solider to the ground.

  Jonah was as shocked by the kiss as he was by the battle and he hesitated, torn between chasing her and staying with his friends, including the padras who was crouched, praying, while Amma did her best to shield him.

  Hugo meanwhile seemed to have the better of the old general, who lay face down, a laser gun to his neck. With a grin the size of lunch he shouted: “Go! Get her!”

  Jonah leapt up. “Nassim! Nassim!” he screamed.

  “Here, Jonah!” shouted Nassim. She’d reached Wadid and draped his arm over her shoulder. The Metrician now lay at his feet, it’s head at an ugly angle. They staggered towards Jonah, excitement on Nassim’s face.

  They were only a few steps apart when a terrible thunder rocked the entire building. The floor rose like a wave. Nassim and Wadid were knocked off their feet. The roof of the hall cracked and then started to collapse, sending down chunks of ceiling tiles like hail.

  Commander Agassi was raining fire on Abaddon like a god.

  “Nassim! Nassim!” Jonah called. But his words were lost in the roar of the attack. Outside, buildings and sand blew into the air, and a massive ball of flame swallowed what remained of the barracks where Jonah had first showered and slept.

  Then a steel beam fell from the roof with an awful groan and crashed down between Jonah and Nassim, showering them in dust. Jonah’s ears were ringing. He tried to push on but the air was thick with bits of falling roof. He heard someone call his name and thought it was Nassim but was surprised to see Hugo appear, bloodied and frantic.

  “Jonah! It’s time to go!”

  “No!” cried Jonah and he pushed Hugo away. But Hugo was stronger. He grabbed Jonah round the shoulders and dragged him backwards through the battle zone until a cloak folded over Jonah’s head and the sound of wind and chanting became tangled with the chaos of the collapsing building.

  “No!” yelled Jonah and he tried to wrestle free. But it was too late. The tumbling had begun and the noise of the wind rose to a dreadful screech and then the chaos of Abaddon was gone. And they floated.

  Chapter 28 - The dead and the buried

  Wadid saw it happen as if in slow motion: Nassim stretching to grasp Jonah’s hand, the beam falling between them and his sister vanishing in a pile of rubble. Pumped with adrenaline, Wadid tossed the beam away like a piece of driftwood, revealing Nassim limp under the wreckage. He stooped to pick her up just in time to see Jonah being dragged away by a Metrician soldier then become lost in a whirlwind of debris and dust.

  Jonah was gone.

  “The tunnels! To the tunnels!” screamed a voice behind Wadid and he turned to see a dirty-faced child shouting at the top of her tiny lungs. So sure did she sound, and so little choice did they have, that Wadid, with his sister cradled in his arms, and all the other mutants, their weapons still blazing, turned their back on the fight and followed the slip of a girl. Matilda leapt like a rabbit between the falling debris and led them deep into the collapsing building. They reached the remains of a lab, darkened by smoke, and stopped momentarily at the top of a ruined stairwell. It was a jagged pile of stone and steel. Bullets and laser fire chased after them and they plunged like rats into the nooks and crannies of the broken stairs.

  Huge explosions rumbled through the wreckage as Agassi’s attack reached its zenith. Abaddon was collapsing.

  “Follow me!” Matilda yelled as she led the mutants deep into the basement, now a narrow passage of blinking lights and cracking concrete. Smoke was seeping in from the fissures above. Wadid staggered along the passageway until they reached a small guardroom where Afiz stood holding the door.

  “In here! Go into the caves! And keep going!” he shouted, pushing Wadid through. Afiz was desperate to follow Nassim, but he stood holding the door in the basement until the last of the damaged and bleeding mutants entered the little room of blank screens and chocolate wrappers, and passed into the rock-hewn passage beyond. Then, as the basement collapsed under the weight of the atrocity above, he too dashed inside and slammed the door to Abaddon.

  ◆◆◆

  The roof of a wooden hut slowly came into view. Against his back he felt the hardness of a timber floor. For a moment he felt comforted by the reassuring splash of waves. He could taste salt on his lips. He wasn’t in Ararat as planned. Something must have happened. Instead he was back in Atlantica, in the wooden hut on the rock inside the multi-coloured cavern.

  Then he remembered.

  Nassim!

  Hugo and Amma were crouching. They looked distracted – but Jonah was hot with anger. He jumped up.

  “You promised you’d save her!” he shouted at Amma. “You promised – but we abandoned her! Left her to die! Left them all to die!”

  Jonah thought to shove her but the old woman retreated, revealing a body on the floor, blood seeping from a shrapnel wound to its chest.

  “Simeon …”

  The padras tried to smile. “I told you we needed two of us,” he breathed. “It was Amma who saved us.” Blood oozed from his wound. Jonah flopped down and pressed a blood-soaked cloth, trying to stem the flow. They sat on the floor of the cabin, with just the sound of the ocean slipping in and out of the plastic cave.

  Hugo spoke. “Um, I don’t want to be rude or anything but where the heck are we, and can someone tell me what just happened?”

  Of course, thought Jonah, Hugo has never experienced a Leap. He’ll be feeling as weird as anything. He rattled a reply, still holding the cloth against Simeon’s chest: “We’re in Atlantica, base of the NMA Atlantic fleet. This is Amma Melania, a friend. This man is the Padras Simeon, the leader of the Nine of Tabor. And we’ve just done Leap from Abaddon.”

  “Uh-huh. I pretty much understood none of that but all in good time, I guess,” said Hugo. Then he punched Jonah on the arm. “Dude, it’s so good to see you!”

  The punch kind of woke Jonah up and he looked at Hugo for the first time. The boy’s face was blood-splattered. He had a small cut above his lip and one eye was swollen.

  “So good to see you too,” he said and punched Hugo back. “Thanks for saving our lives. That was … insane. GK, he … he … feng it! There’s so much to tell you Hugo! You did an incredible thing.”

  “Aww yeah, I only did what I had to. He was going to kill that girl Nass…” he hesitated.

  “Nassim,”

  “Yeah, her. I mean what’s with that? Killing kids? And those mutants, when I figured out he was breeding them suckers I was like, dude, no!”

  Jonah smiled. Hugo had a way with words alright.

  “We should go. This padras fella needs some help,” said Hugo.

  Just then the door opened and another familiar face appeared. “Well, look who the cat dragged in!” said Tria and pulled Jonah to his feet. “So, you followed my instructions after all, Salvatorus, and came back alive!”

&n
bsp; Jonah smiled again. He was still angry about Nassim, but being with old friends, well, everything seemed a bit better.

  “As instructed, ma’am,” he said as he gave her a quick hug. “These are my friends, Amma and Hugo. And Padras Simeon. He’s injured pretty badly. Can you get us a medic?”

  Tria was one step ahead and waved in two medics who’d climbed the rope ladder with medi-kits on their backs. They gave Simeon a cocktail of drugs and sprayed synthetic tissue onto his wound. He was lowered to a bot that hovered at the foot of the rock.

  “Well that’s that then,” said Tria matter-of-factly and she clapped her hands. “Now, since you’ve been away for so long, a few things have happened. Agassi has got something to show you. Come with me, all of you.”

  “Wait, what do you mean? We’ve come straight from Abaddon,” said Jonah, holding her arm.

  “It’s three days since the attack, Jonah,” said Tria.

  “Three days! What do you mean? We’ve only just got here!”

  They both looked at Amma Melania and she shrugged and sighed. “Sometimes it happens. We can’t always control the Leap. We’ve been in between.”

  “In between?” they both asked.

  “Yes, between here and there. In between. It can be a short time, it can be a long time.”

  Jonah looked ashen. Three days! That meant a lot. Every day meant another day gone.

  He started to speak but Tria held up her hand. “I think I know what you’re going to say. Just hold your horses until you’ve seen what Agassi has to show you. And we need to get Simeon to the hospital.”

  Jonah swallowed his anger and nodded. They descended the ladder and splashed through the zany-coloured tunnels until they came to the bustle of Atlantica, with soldiers and tekkies and messengers dashing to and fro. They stopped at a small medical facility and bid farewell to Amma and the padras, who was now unconscious, aboard his floating bot, then continued through the maze of corridors and rooms eventually reaching the sweeping spiral stairs that took them to the dark, blue-lit bridge. Only a handful of personnel sat at their stations. Commander Agassi stood with her hands behind her back staring at a large holoscreen. The hairs stood up on Jonah’s neck. The holo’ was replaying the destruction of Abaddon.

  From a drone camera, high above the Egyptian desert, Jonah saw the arc of a rocket as it descended from the stratosphere and approach the massive, flat-roofed complex. For a second, the entire screen went blank as the flash of an explosion turned everything white. As colour returned, it became obvious the missile had delivered a cluster bomb, raining mini-explosives onto Abaddon, smashing portions of the roof and blowing up towers of sand in the surrounding desert.

  “You see, Salvatore,” said Agassi without turning around.

  “No nukes. Just plain old cluster bombs. I hope you are satisfied.”

  She pulled at the bottom of her jacket and brushed her hand across it, as if she was wiping something clean and walked away, into the gloom of the bridge.

  Jonah, Tria and Hugo watched the destruction unfold. More missiles entered the view and unleashed their clusters of white fury. With each explosion more of the building collapsed, falling in on itself like an unstable cake. Smoke spiralled into the orange sky.

  Then out of the haze emerged a disc, oblong in shape with fire at its rear and streams of smoke pouring from its bristling sides. It was a ship, the same fighter that smashed through the mutant hall delivering Hugo, Grace and GK. Now it was escaping the collapse, like a scoundrel running from a crime scene. The ship wobbled and hovered for a moment. Then the rear engines flared and it shot across the desert, rising in a giant swoop and disappeared from view.

  “GK,” whispered Jonah.

  “Yeah and Grace too, I reckon,” said Hugo.

  Jonah felt ill. He didn’t want his grandfather to die. Nor Grace. But seeing the ship escape while Nassim and Wadid were in the ruins made him feel sick.

  “There’s more. Watch,” said Tria. She blinked at the screen and the film sped forwards, showing bombs shower down and fires consume what was left of the labs and hospital and the garden courtyard besides the kitchen. The attack eventually stopped and dusk came and turned to night, and the ruins shifted from yellow to a fiery red. The surrounding desert looked warm from the glow. Dawn came and the fires diminished but continued all day and all through the next night.

  Tria let the film speed through the next day, and then another night, until she reached a certain time signature where she slowed the frame to normal. Little spirals of white smoke still rose from the mess but the site looked settled, almost peaceful. A smouldering ruin of jumbled rocks and blackened steel.

  She zoomed in, bringing the centre of the wreck closer to view. For a while the drone scanned across the rubble. But then a movement caught Jonah’s eye and he was reminded of being in Sky London, all those months ago, when his father’s leg – and it really was! – slipped across the screen. This time, the movement was flesh, the back of a human, naked, clambering over the broken stone, then disappearing into a crevice, as if crawling into a hole.

  Tria played the scene again, zooming in to show a grainy close-up of the naked man, gingerly scaling the ruins, then sliding into the crevice.

  “It’s like he knows where he’s going,” said Jonah.

  “As if he’s been there before,” added Hugo.

  “Or perhaps was there the whole time,” replied Tria.

  Jonah thought for a moment. “You mean underground, under that pile of rubble?”

  “Yes, exactly,” she replied, “Look.” And she replayed the film, this time at half speed. The naked man was clearly a mutant: it’s oversized torso and rippling neck muscles suggested some kind of super-man; the eagle-like talon at the end of its right arm was a dead give away. And the way it moved, purposefully scanning the ruins, as if looking for something and then sliding back into the hole – it looked like it knew the place, like it belonged.

  “You mean, it’s living under there and …” said Hugo.

  “… and there may be others?” Jonah finished Hugo’s sentence. His heart skipped a beat. If one mutant was alive under there, then others must be. And maybe, just maybe, Nassim.

  “Yes, there may be,” said Tria.

  “Which means we need to get there, now,” said Jonah.

  “Yes, indeed it does,” said Tria. “This is why you needed to see the drone shots. If there are mutants still alive we need to get them before the Metricians do. You guys need to pack your bags. We’re going treasure hunting.”

  Jonah looked at her. He couldn’t believe what she was saying. “What, us?” he asked, glancing at Hugo.

  “Commander’s orders. If we can’t kill ‘em, then let’s get ‘em. We were just waiting for you turn up. Lucky you did, I was running out of patience. My ship’s ready and waiting.” And she laughed out loud.

  So did Jonah. And Hugo too. “Viper Squad lives again!” he said and slapped Jonah on the back.

  “Eh?” asked Tria.

  And the two boys laughed again. “We’ll tell you about it later. Now where’s this ship?”

  — TIMELINE —

  1896 Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius proposes the idea of global warming, calling it ‘the greenhouse effect’

  1960 US scientist Roger Revelle proves the greenhouse effect is real

  1987 Physicians report that H5N1, commonly known as the ‘bird flu virus’, can kill humans

  2003 The SARS virus sweeps the world causing thousands of deaths due to pneumonia

  2008 Panic over H5N1 forces governments to kill millions of chickens, ducks and turkeys

  2014 Ebola virus kills hundreds of people across sub- Saharan Africa

  2019 The hottest year in recorded history

  2021 57,000 people die in mystery disease in Brazil. A highly contagious strain of bird flu virus, H5N6 is discovered as the cause

  2022 Global warming blamed for worst hurricanes to hit the Gulf of Mexico; five major US cities have

&
nbsp; suburbs flattened; Jamaica, Cuba, Haiti destroyed

  2026 New outbreaks of SARS and pig-flu arise in Europe; 333 foot and mouth appears in Australia and New Zealand destroying agricultural industries

  2031 Island states of Tuvalu and Maldives sink under rising oceans; Venice abandoned

  2037 Second major outbreak of H5N6, this time in West Africa, kills 1.5 million; spreads rapidly including South Africa, and jumps a year later to Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands

  2050 Sea rise officially more than 30cm; Netherlands announces flood evacuation plan

  2055 Russia, USA and China fight a brief but significant war for the new Arctic pasture-lands

  2060-2070 Storms destroy many North Sea, Atlantic and Pacific ports and towns; Netherlands and parts of northern Europe coastline now submerged; half of the Himalayan glaciers melted; floods kill millions across the globe

  2072 First Congress of Scientists meets in secret to form the Metricia Society

  2075 Third outbreak of H5N6, and its sister H6N12, kills millions across Middle East, Mediterranean and Balkans, creating economic catastrophe

  2076 American scientist Josef Sikorsky (great, great grandson of the helicopter pioneer) discovers CounterGrav, anti-gravity technology; he sells the technology to Tek Corp, a front for Metricia

  2081 The Contagion, (or H5N6) is now out of control in Africa, SE Asia and South America

  2083 Secret plans are made for the first Sky City

  2080-2120 “The Dark Decades”: 30 years of out-of-control disease and weather which grind down government and society; local wars and crime dominate daily life; the entire Arctic has melted and the world’s great cities are now regularly flooded

  2121 The Great Escape. Metricians flee to Sky London