Fallout

by Chris Morphew

  ‘That would’ve been a pretty bad tactical decision.’

  ‘You’d be dead,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Luke, sounding slightly exasperated. ‘That’s why I didn’t do it.’

  ‘You would have been shot dead,’ I said, lowering my voice as we neared the bottom of the stairs. ‘Shot. Not stabbed.’

  ‘That’s not exactly an improvement.’

  ‘I know, but you get what I’m saying, right? You could have changed it. You could have changed what we saw on that video. None of it would have happened.’

  ‘That’s not what Kara says.’

  I breathed a frustrated sigh. This was not a new conversation. And as far as Kara was concerned, there was only one way this was all going to play out. The way she’d explained it, there was no last time and this time. It was all one time. All the same. What we’d seen on that video wasn’t just going to happen, it had already happened. It was just as unchangeable as anything else in the past.

  ‘Kara’s not a scientist,’ I said. ‘She’s a doctor.’

  ‘Right,’ said Luke, squinting at the sudden brightness as we walked into the corridor. ‘Yeah. I hope you’re right.’

  Mum and Mr Hunter were both waiting up for us in the surveillance room, nursing mugs of tea. The teabags sat in a little dish on the table, ready to be dried out and reused.

  Mr Hunter came over to meet us. He frowned at the expression on Luke’s face. ‘Everything okay?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Luke quickly. ‘Almost ran into security on the way back, but we’re okay.’

  Mum hoisted herself out of her chair, grunting with the effort. ‘I can’t believe I keep letting you do this.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘What about you guys? Is everyone else –?’

  I jumped back, startled, as I realised for the first time that Amy was in here too. She was sitting in the corner on the edge of the table, staring into space like she was hypnotised.

  I walked up to her. ‘Amy…?’

  ‘Whoa. Hi,’ she said. ‘Sorry. I guess I kind of spaced out for a bit there, huh?’ She blinked hard and got to her feet. ‘I think I’m going to go to bed.’

  I stared after her as she left the room.

  ‘How long was she sitting there?’ Luke asked.

  ‘A while,’ his dad said. ‘We did ask if she was…’ He looked up. ‘Did you hear that?’

  Everyone stopped. For a moment, all I could hear was whirring computers and the buzz of a fluorescent tube flickering in the next room.

  Smash!

  A noise like a battering ram, violent but far off. It was coming from somewhere in the research module.

  ‘Crap,’ said Luke, standing over one of the monitors. I joined him just in time to see a cloud of dust billow up into the camera lens.

  ‘Is that…?’ asked Mum, behind me.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said.

  ‘Bill’s room.’

  Chapter 9

  SATURDAY, AUGUST 1

  12 DAYS

  ‘Hey!’ Peter shouted, as Luke and I sprinted past his door. ‘HEY! What’s going on out there?’

  We ignored him. Another explosion of sound echoed up the corridor. Creaking, twisting metal.

  ‘Are you sure we should be running towards him?’ Luke panted.

  ‘I don’t think Bill’s going to hurt us,’ I said. ‘He needs our help, remember?’

  ‘He put me in the hospital!’

  ‘Okay, yeah, but – we’ll be careful.’

  I could see something silhouetted in the dim light, blocking our path up ahead. I slowed as we reached it.

  The metal bookcase that had sealed the entrance to Bill’s room was lying on its side, bent in half like it was made of cardboard. It was wedged into the debris at a particularly narrow section of the corridor, forming a makeshift barrier to keep us out.

  ‘Help me move it,’ I said, gripping the bookcase with both hands. Luke leant in next to me. I dug in with my heels. The bookcase shifted slightly, scraping against the walls, but only seemed to get itself more tightly lodged into the surrounding bits of debris.

  ‘You really want to be doing that?’ said Mr Hunter, coming up the corridor behind us.

  ‘No,’ said Luke.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Okay, fine. Yes.’

  Mr Hunter shouldered his way in between Luke and me. ‘Okay. Three. Two. One. Push.’

  The bookcase buckled, angling forward, grinding against the concrete on either side. We pushed again. All at once it came loose, crashing to the ground.

  I clambered over and ducked into Bill’s room. The dust was clearing by now. Bill’s bed had been thrown across the room, and was now lying on its side against the wall. The contents of Kara’s medical kit were scattered all over the place. I scanned through the mess, snatching up a sedative pen and the penlight Kara had used to check Bill’s eyes. We kept moving, deeper into the research module.

  Another, smaller tunnel came up on our left and I almost stopped running again. I’d been down there only once before, into a room stained with Luke’s twenty-year-old blood.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Mr Hunter asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Luke. ‘Come on.’

  More noise up ahead, like someone beating at the walls with a hammer. I flicked on the torch as we left the last of the functioning ceiling lights behind. We barely ever came down this deep. The tunnel pressed in all around us now, the remnants of the old labs almost impossible to pick out in the ocean of concrete. The hammering sound was louder now. Slow, irregular smashing.

  ‘So what’s the plan here?’ asked Luke.

  ‘I just want to talk to him,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, but –’

  ‘He knew about Tabitha!’ I said. ‘He knew about stuff that no-one was meant to know! Don’t you think we should find out if that includes Tobias?’

  The light from behind us had all but faded away, leaving us to navigate by the light of Kara’s little torch. I flashed it around at the tunnel walls. Luke and I had spent a whole week mapping this place out, but it was such a labyrinth that I still got lost every time I came down here.

  ‘Hang on a sec,’ said Luke, pointing past me. ‘Turn your torch off.’

  I clicked the button on the penlight, plunging us into total darkness. Almost total darkness. A dim light slid across the wall up ahead, in and out of view, like it was coming from around a corner.

  ‘There!’ said Luke.

  I edged towards the light, leaving the penlight switched off. The tunnel squeezed even tighter for a few metres, then widened out again, opening onto a room that seemed to have escaped the explosion and the concreting almost completely.

  It looked like Peter’s room had looked back in my vision with Soren’s dad and Remi Vattel. Two separate areas, divided by a wall of glass that had long since shattered to the floor.

  Bill was up the other end, standing with his back to us, waist-deep in smashed computers and upended tables and chairs, swinging a pickaxe out wide over his shoulder. He had one of Kara and Soren’s excavating helmets strapped to his head, which explained the light we’d seen coming in.

  Bill slammed the pickaxe down again, sending chips of concrete shooting into the darkness. He let out a wild, animal laugh, like nothing could give him more joy than tearing into that wall.

  ‘Hey Bill,’ I said, walking slowly towards him. ‘It’s good to see you awake again.’

  He whirled around, face masked in shadow, spot-lighting us in the beam from his helmet. ‘You’re early.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. We didn’t realise –’

  ‘No, no, no, that’s enough!’ said Bill, raising a finger like a parent scolding their kid. ‘Leave. You are the wrong one. I have told you this. You are not right, and you are all far too early for my – my purposes.’ He dropped the pickaxe and put his hands to his head.

  ‘Maybe we should come back later,’ said Mr Hunter out of the corner of his mouth.

  ‘You told us you need
ed our help,’ I said gently, edging forward again, flicking my torch back on to see him properly. ‘Remember? Out at the airport. You said you needed Luke and me to –’

  ‘NO!’ Bill bellowed, and I had to throw myself out of the way as a computer monitor suddenly leapt from the rubble and flew at me. The monitor smashed to pieces against the back wall, narrowly missing Luke and his dad.

  I straightened up again. ‘Please, Bill. Talk to me. If you explain what you’re doing, maybe we can help.’

  ‘No, I already –’ Bill muttered, hunching over like he was trying to get his head around something. ‘That’s not how it works! I have seen this! You can’t – Argh!’

  He broke off in a rage, fists in the air, stomping the floor. The ground between us started moving.

  Something was rising up off the floor. Glass. The shattered dividing wall, thousands of jagged, glimmering shards, lifting into the air to form a deadly barrier between us and Bill.

  ‘Jordan!’ said Luke urgently, running up to grab my arm. ‘Let’s go.’

  ‘Leave!’ Bill shouted, his face fractured and glinting behind the wall of glass. ‘Leave me! I will come when you are needed!’

  He snatched up the pickaxe. Luke yanked at my arm again, dragging me towards the corridor.

  ‘The time is coming!’ Bill raged on. ‘It is coming! I will come for you!’

  Mr Hunter grabbed my other hand. They hauled me into the shadows, a second before Bill fired the shards at the wall, drowning his own shouting in a furious explosion of splintering glass.

  Chapter 10

  MONDAY, AUGUST 3

  10 DAYS

  ‘I want to go back and talk to him again,’ I said quietly, ducking under a low-hanging branch.

  ‘Jordan…’ I could hear Luke switching into voice-of-reason mode. ‘Do you really think you’re going to get anything out of him? I mean, he’s made it pretty clear he doesn’t want to talk to us.’

  It was early morning, two days after Bill’s breakout. We were heading out past the south end of town to catch up with Reeve. It was a bit of a hike, but we’d made use of the journey to set up another fake campsite in the bush – half-buried rubbish and remnants of a makeshift shelter, just to keep the Co-operative guessing. And beyond that, I think Luke and I were both grateful for an excuse to get outside.

  Luke’s parents hadn’t spoken to each other since last night, when Mr Hunter had tried to intervene in an argument between Ms Hunter and Kara about not hanging up laundry in the kitchen. Luke’s mum had been furious at him for ‘taking that impossible woman’s side’, and angrier still when he’d refused to keep arguing with her about it. This, apparently, was the same ‘pig-headed, passive-aggressive crap’ that had led her to divorce him in the first place.

  Meanwhile, Cathryn had lost it with Georgia again – first for playing on her bed, and then for catching her making a grab at Ms Hunter’s kitchen keys – and Mike had taken to sneaking around with his old overseer notebook, trying to eavesdrop on my conversations with Luke. I had a feeling Soren had put him up to it.

  Bill was still roaming around in the depths of the Complex, smashing at walls, volatile as ever. It terrified me to think what might happen if he strayed into the living area. But all that didn’t excuse us from trying to get answers out of him when there were only ten days left until the end of the world.

  Kara was looking for a way to contain him. The sedative pens might have been an option if we’d had enough cartridges left to put him under and keep him there, but we were running low and had decided it was best to save them in case of an emergency.

  Soren, on the other hand, wanted to deal with Bill the same way he wanted to deal with every other inconvenience in his life: by putting a bullet in him. Between him, Bill, Peter and Mike, it was a miracle no-one had gotten seriously hurt yet.

  ‘I just want to know what Bill’s doing down there!’ I said. ‘I mean, Kara said there’s nothing left to dig up but exploded labs and concrete, so what does he –?’

  And then a thought dropped into my head. An explanation, not just for Bill’s newfound pickaxe obsession, but for Bill himself.

  ‘What?’ said Luke.

  ‘What if he’s one of them?’ I said.

  ‘One of who?’

  ‘Vattel’s people!’ I said. ‘One of her researchers from twenty years ago! What if that’s why he’s so obsessed with finding something down there? Kara was just their doctor. She wasn’t involved in their research. So, what if there was something going on that she didn’t know about? Something that could help us. What if –?’ I hesitated, stomach jolting. ‘I need to go back.’

  Luke’s brow furrowed. ‘Back where?’

  ‘No, that’s what Bill said at the airport when we first met him. I need to go back. We thought he was talking about going home – going back to wherever he came from on the outside – but what if that wasn’t what he was saying? What if he was talking about going back to the Complex?’

  ‘Then why didn’t he just go back to the Complex?’ said Luke. ‘Why drag us into it?’

  ‘I don’t know! But that’s exactly why we need to talk –’ I cut the sentence short as we came up on a wide dirt path through the bush. The road to the former airport. ‘Hold on a second.’

  I crept low through the undergrowth in the direction of town, ignoring Luke’s hisses of protest. I stopped at the edge of the bushland, just out of view of the security cameras, and reached into my jeans pocket, pulling out the video camera Luke had given to Georgia. I flipped it open and hit record, panning slowly across the town. Rows of identical houses, all abandoned. And beyond them, the town centre.

  My vision blurred with tears but I kept my hand steady, determined to capture as much as I could. I zoomed in, passing over the office complex, the hospital, the Shackleton Building, everything still, dead, eerily quiet, apart from a few security guards out keeping an eye on the emptiness. Even the fenced-off exercise area was deserted this early in the morning.

  We could see all this on the security monitors whenever we wanted, but not like this. This was different. Sitting here in the bushes, actually seeing it all, knowing Dad was in there, knowing just how close and how far away he was…

  I wiped my eyes on the back of my sleeve. We had to get in there.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Luke whispered, crouching.

  I pocketed the camera again, getting hold of myself. ‘Done. Come on, we should keep moving.’

  ‘Jordan…what was that about?’ asked Luke, as we backtracked to a safe distance.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, rubbing my eyes. ‘I’m not – I just figure, why wait around until I’ve got this camera thing completely figured out before I start using it? I have to believe it’s meant to be more than just a toy for Georgia to play with.’

  ‘Why?’ said Luke. ‘Why can’t it just be a random thing you saw in a vision?’

  ‘Because I saw it in a vision, Luke! My brain got dragged through time and saw this camera. You want to tell me that doesn’t mean anything?’

  For a second, Luke looked ready to drop it. But then he said, ‘What do you want it to mean? Kara already gave us an explanation. The fallout. The same thing that’s causing Amy’s speed and Georgia’s mind thing and Peter’s – whatever. We know why you’re having these visions. Why do you need to add –?’

  ‘No, we don’t,’ I said. ‘We don’t know why I’m having visions. We know how I’m having them. That’s not the same thing.’

  ‘What do you think this is? Some, like, higher power controlling your mind? Making you see things?’

  ‘I don’t know!’ I snapped, caught off-guard by how negative he was being. ‘But how far do you think we would’ve got without them? Where did we figure out how to get into Shackleton’s tunnels? How to find Kara and Soren? How to open that thing they had Bill trapped in? That was all just random too, was it?’

  I realised I’d started speeding up, pulling away from Luke, angry without knowing exactly why, except that
I needed him to believe me about this, even if I wasn’t entirely clear on what I believed myself.

  Luke ran to catch up, sidestepping in front of me. ‘Jordan, look, don’t – I’m not saying there isn’t something to all this. I’m just saying be careful. You’re not the first person in this place to start listening to powers they couldn’t see.’

  ‘You think this is –?’ I clenched my fingers. ‘So, because Mike was stupid enough to believe in Kara and Soren, that means no-one should believe in anything?’

  ‘I didn’t say that. But we’ve had a pretty solid vision of me getting stabbed to death sometime in the next two weeks. So if you’re wondering why I’m not more willing to just jump onboard with this…’

  Luke trailed off and I felt my anger bleed away. That was what this was about. Of course it was.

  ‘That’s different,’ I said. ‘That wasn’t one of my visions.’

  ‘Doesn’t feel much different,’ said Luke.

  ‘It’s not going to happen, Luke. We’ll change it. We’ll find a way.’

  I could see he wasn’t convinced, but he nodded anyway, and we pushed on again. I held onto his hand, focusing on that connection, that physical reminder that we were both still here, keeping each other alive. Even now, with both of my feet firmly in the present, he felt like the only solid thing in the whole world.

  We skirted around the south-east corner of town and deeper into the bush, eventually meeting up with one of the bike tracks. We followed it for a kilometre or so, until finally a familiar rock formation loomed in front of us. A giant boulder with a couple of smaller boulders sitting on top of it. We’d met Reeve here once before, the day we first told him about Tabitha.

  Luke and I circuited the rock and found him waiting at the same outcropping we’d cowered under, all those weeks ago.

  ‘Hey, kids,’ said Reeve. ‘How’s this for déjà vu?’

  I looked out through the bush. The sun was still rising, light streaking in between the trees. ‘Least it’s not raining this –’

  The words died in my throat as Reeve moved out of the shadows and I took in his clothes for the first time. He was wearing the new jumper Miller had brought him from town. I realised I’d seen it before. A hundred times before. Over and over again, on the grainy old video and in the pictures that replayed in a constant loop in my mind. Reeve was wearing the same jumper that Luke had worn in Kara’s tape. The jumper Luke was going to be murdered in.