End of the End

by Paul Kane, Simon Guerrier

  I blinked at the message. Maybe I’d typed it wrong.

  I tried again, the chunky keyboard clattering.

  Incorrect Password.

  Please try again.

  “This can’t be right.” One more failed attempt and I’d need a network administrator. I frowned at my hands, as if it was their fault.

  “Perhaps you’re using an old one,” Olive suggested, making me want to throw the keyboard at her stupid smug face. Of course I wasn’t. I knew my password. I’d only changed it last week.

  I tried again. One last chance.

  Incorrect Password.

  Please contact the administrator.

  I slammed my fists down on the desk, and then jumped as a voice spoke behind me.

  “Excuse me, but what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  KILL

  NOW EVERYONE HAD torches, although I’d told them to kill the lights as soon as we crept out into the field.

  “I could break my neck,” complained Fenton.

  Only if there was a God...

  “We don’t want to advertise our presence,” I suggested, pushing through waist-high grass. “There’s no way of knowing who’s watching—so keep your voices down for that matter. Sound travels after dark.”

  The night air was cold, but thankfully dry at last, although the mud beneath our boots squelched with every step. In the distance a fox screamed. I’d always hated that noise. When I was a kid I’d stayed entire summers with my Gran, staying in the attic of her cottage. You wouldn’t believe the horrors I’d imagined when one of those bastards started up in the middle of the night.

  “It’s okay, pet. Just a vixen.” Show no weakness, soldier. You’ve nothing to fear.

  “Yes, Gran.” Sir, yes, sir. Nothing to fear but fear itself.

  And the bullets, and the mines, and the gas, and—

  I had the feeling there would be more screams before the night was out.

  We kept moving on, everyone heeding my words and shutting the fuck up. Even Fenton. Brennan was on my heels, leading the rest of her pack; Beck keeping some distance between her and Fenton, and behind him, the two goons who had grabbed me that morning. The man-mountain to the left was called Garret, and his hulk of a partner Curtis. Neither were what you’d call chatty, but they weren’t here for conversation. Garret had a fireman’s axe strapped between his monstrous shoulders, while Curtis was lugging a portable battering ram on his back. The thing must have weighed twenty kilos. Say this for Brennan, the armoury she’d salvaged and jury-rigged was impressive, and her people weren’t the idiots I’d written off this morning. Inexperienced, yes, but they would come good, given the right orders.

  I almost believed we had half a chance of surviving the night, if everyone—I’m looking at you, Fenton—if everyone did what they were told.

  BECK, GARRET AND Curtis were packing automatic rifles, Fenton a pump-action shotgun and Brennan a handgun, with another at her waist.

  I was happy to stick to my handguns, the P99 in my hand and the Colt in a belt holster along with the Bowie knife. The remote grenades were hanging from a strap slung across my chest, a quarter of the plastic explosives stowed safely in my pack.

  Just another day, ready to cause merry hell.

  I was counting my paces, leading the group to what I had found the day before. I slowed, raising my gun hand so the others did likewise.

  “Is it here?” Brennan asked.

  I stepped onto the concrete rim of the grate.

  “What do you think?”

  It was round, about six feet in diameter, the metal bars old and rusted, although, as I’d found out yesterday, they were still strong enough.

  Slipping my Walther back into its holster, I crouched down as Brennan and the others formed a semi-circle around me. I shone the light into the shaft, my beam of light picking out a floor covered in bird-shit and clods of mud some twenty feet beneath us.

  Fenton lit his torch, mirroring my action. “That’s a long way down,” he sneered, before hawking loudly and spitting a ball of phlegm through the grate. It dropped, illuminated by his beam before landing wetly on the floor below.

  “It’s not far,” insisted Beck. “No more than six metres at most.”

  Brennan reached forward and grabbed hold of the grate with a gloved hand, testing its resistance. “So, how do we get down?”

  Getting to my feet, I stepped three quarters of the way around the grating and flashed my torch down again, tracing the bars.

  Brennan dropped down onto her haunches, running her hands along the metal. “They’ve been cut!”

  I nodded. “If Beck had searched my bag yesterday, she would have found a hacksaw.”

  Brennan looked up into the light. “You did this?”

  “Last night, just before the sun went down,” I confirmed.

  “You were lucky no one saw.”

  To say the least. In daylight there had been a direct line of sight to the top floor of Neighbourhood Four. It was a calculated risk.

  Brennan slipped her fingers through the grating, grabbing hold and pulling sharply. There was movement, but not enough. I shone the beam around the semi-circle I’d managed to cut. The torchlight found solid metal.

  “You didn’t finish the job?” said Fenton.

  “The blade snapped,” I retorted, annoyed. “It was old.”

  He looked me up and down. “You’re telling me.”

  It would be so easy to dash his brains out on the concrete.

  I flashed the torch in the direction that we had walked. “There used to be a hardware store, about half a mile that-a-way.”

  “Yeah, we found it,” Beck confirmed. “Cleared out.”

  “I thought I might find a saw lying about,” I admitted. “But no such luck. The ceiling’s come down.”

  Brennan tested the grille. “There’s some give in this. If we could bend it up...”

  Fenton boggled. “You’re joking!”

  “It should be wide enough to climb through.”

  “And then what?” Fenton asked. “Drop to the bottom?”

  Yeah. Hopefully, you’d land on your head.

  Beck grabbed Fenton’s arm to shine his light down the concrete walls of the shaft.

  “There’s a ladder.”

  “Why do you think I cut here?” I said.

  Beck crouched down, Brennan stepping aside to let the larger woman examine the grate. Putting down her gun, Beck grabbed the bars with both hands and heaved, grunting slightly with the effort, and then let go, nodding.

  “Yeah, that’ll come. Garret, you and Curtis, with me.”

  The two meatheads fell in, crouching either side of Beck.

  I stepped around them, shining my light onto the spot where the blade had snapped.

  “On three,” the woman commanded. “One... two... three.”

  They began to pull, the metal squealing in protest. They made little progress at first.

  “Hang on,” Fenton said, passing his torch to Brennan so he could produce a crowbar from his pack.

  Perhaps he wasn’t such a waste of space. I guessed there had to be a reason Brennan kept him around. It certainly wasn’t because of his charm.

  Fenton dropped to his knees beside Garret. “That’s it,” he said, shoving the crowbar into the ever-growing gap. “Almost there.”

  He was right. The metal was beginning to buckle.

  “I’m in,’ said Fenton, pushing down on the lever. “That’s it. That’s it.”

  Then he slipped, the crowbar springing into the air. It landed on top of the crate, upended and then tumbled down the shaft to clatter on the floor below.

  The sound rang out across the night.

  We all froze.

  Nothing. Not even another bloody fox.

  Brennan breathed out. “It’s okay. No one could have heard that, not this far away.”

  I wondered who she was trying to convince.

  “It bloody hurt,” whined Fe
nton, taking off a glove to rub his aching palm.

  Someone get the boy a tissue.

  “We can do this,” Beck said, and they redoubled their efforts.

  The grille was giving way now, opening as if on a hinge. In theory, we could probably wriggle through already, but it would be a bit tight. Curtis shifted position, pushing from underneath now, Beck pulling from above. The cords of her neck were bunching, looking ready to break, before she slipped and fell back with a cry.

  It didn’t matter. The twisted metal stood proud, pointing up towards the clouds that smothered the stars above.

  “That’ll do,” panted Beck, taking my hand. She hauled herself back to her feet and retrieved her rifle. “We should be able to get through now.”

  Fenton shone his torch over the roughly hacked hole. “You sure?”

  “Who wants to go first?” I asked, knowing full well what the answer would be.

  “You can lead the way,” Brennan said simply.

  “No problem,” I said, passing my pack to Beck. “Pass this down to me when I’m through. I don’t want it catching on the sides.”

  Slipping my torch into my pocket, I sat myself on edge of the shaft and swung my legs down, searching for the rungs of the ladder.

  CHAPTER NINE

  CURE

  I TURNED IN the chair to find Lam Chen standing in the door, a coffee mug in his podgy hand. Lam headed up the technical department, and could usually be found up to his elbows in fibre optic cables or squinting at a screen.

  Now, his eyes went wide behind thick-rimmed glasses. “Dr Tomas, sorry, I... I didn’t realise it was you.”

  “Something’s wrong with your terminal,” I said, brushing past the moment. We had bigger problems.

  “I know,” the technician said, pushing past Olive. He slapped his mug down on the desk, black tea slopping over the rim to leave another mark on an already stained table top.

  Lam ran his hand through his wispy black hair as he stared at the monitor. I pushed my chair back to let him get closer to the keyboard. He grabbed the mouse, placing the cursor back into the dialogue box and tried to enter his own password.

  Access denied.

  “I just don’t understand it,” he admitted, tapping a long nail on the desktop. “It’s been like this since I checked the files with Chief Moore.”

  “Can’t you bypass it?”

  “None of the passwords are working.”

  “None of them? But you’re the administrator. Don’t you have a... I don’t know... override?”

  “My account is the override,” he replied irritably.

  “Could it be a virus?”

  “I wish I knew.”

  Lam fetched a second chair from the other side of the control room, removing a battered guitar. The place was a mess, Lam’s little kingdom, with piles of comics scattered around the workstation and a games console and headset pushed to the edge of the desk. How did Moore cope with it?

  Leaning the instrument against the wall, Lam sat down, wheeling himself back towards the keyboard. He began furiously tapping the keys, his fingers a blur. I had a feeling that he’d tried all of the combinations before, but couldn’t help repeating the process, just in case one of them suddenly worked.

  “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting the results to change,” Olive commented from the door. “Benjamin Franklin.”

  “Einstein,” I snapped, Lam looking up from the screen.

  “What?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said, glaring at my assistant.

  Lam shot a look at the door. He’d obviously having been so engrossed in his work that he hadn’t heard Olive’s snide remark. Probably for the best.

  “What’s the solution?” I asked, pulling him back to the problem at hand.

  He took another sip from his mug of tea. “At the moment, I honestly don’t know. Chief Moore told me to go back to my quarters, but...”

  A thought struck him and he tried entering a different password with his left hand, only to be greeted by the same error message.

  “But, what?” I prompted. I wasn’t surprised the technician had chosen to ignore Moore’s instructions. Lam had always been a law unto himself.

  He sat back in his chair, sipping more tea, staring at the computer screen as if he could will it to unlock.

  “I can’t leave it like this,” he admitted. “It’s bad enough that someone got in here and wiped the files—”

  “Not to mention taking the discs,” I reminded him, looking up at the bank of DVD recorders beside the games console.

  “But to lock us out?”

  “You think the two things are linked?”

  “You don’t?” came the reply. “If I didn’t know better I’d say the lockdown happened because we were looking for the missing files.”

  “Like a... what? A booby trap?”

  Lam pushed his glasses up his nose. “They didn’t want us rooting around.”

  I leant forward, resting my arms on my legs. “Who didn’t?”

  “I don’t know. Whoever offed the frea—”

  Lam stopped himself, trying to cover his gaff by taking the biggest gulp of tea yet.

  “The what?”

  “The kid. Steven.”

  “Samuel,” I corrected.

  “Yeah, him.” Lam put his mug back on the table, concentrating too hard on the computer screen.

  I sat back on my chair. “What were you going to call him?”

  Lam played with the mouse, moving the cursor pointlessly around the screen.

  “Nothing.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I didn’t mean anything. It’s just a nickname.”

  “Freak.”

  “Everyone calls them that.”

  I crossed my arms, raising my eyebrows. I knew full well how certain members of technical and security support viewed the subjects, but to hear it from Lam? He’d never talked like this before.

  “Do they?”

  “Yes—well, no. Not everyone. Just a few...”

  “Who?” I wasn’t about to let him off the hook, no matter how much the guy squirmed.

  “Look,” he said, turning to me and raising a hand as if to stave off a blow. “What you guys are doing, it’s nothing to do with me.”

  “Nothing to do with you?”

  “I get it, I’ve heard the speeches—it’s for the good of humanity.”

  This was too much. “Speeches?” I parroted. “They’re speeches now?”

  Lam flailed. “Your... you know, your updates—talks. I get what you’re trying to do.”

  My hackles were up now. “But you don’t approve?”

  Lam looked like he wanted to run from the room. What had I stumbled upon here? “Do we have to get into this now?”

  I leant forward again. “Lam, one of our subjects has been killed, brutally murdered. This is exactly the time to get into this.”

  Lam’s mouth opened and shut like a fish. He pointed at the screen showing Samuel’s empty room. “You don’t think I had anything to do with that?”

  “I don’t know, Lam. Let’s think about it.” I started ticking off points on my fingers. “The computers records have been wiped, the DVDs have gone missing.”

  Lam clasped his head between his palms in disbelief. “This can’t be happening.”

  “No one can get into the system.”

  He looked up in dismay. “Not even me.”

  “So you say. How do I know you’re using the right password?”

  “This is nuts.”

  “Says the man who calls our patients—what was it? Freaks?”

  Lam stood, pacing back and forth. Behind him, Olive took a step forward as if worried he was about to lunge at me.

  “It’s just a name, okay, just a name.”

  “You should know better,” Olive snapped.

  “I didn’t mean anything by it. People call them plenty of things. It doesn’t mean anything.”
>
  “Then why don’t we try a few names?” Olive pitched in again, with more venom than I had ever heard. “What about ‘geek’? ‘Nerd’? ‘Chink’?”

  I stood up, sending my chair spinning away. “That’s enough,” I said, shocked at her behaviour. No matter what Lam had said, there was no need for that kind of talk, not in my base. She sank back to the door, eyes down, her cheeks flushed.

  I turned back to Lam.

  “I’m sorry—” I began, but the technician interrupted me.

  “No, I am,” he said, rubbing his chin with a shaking hand. “I shouldn’t have said that. Look, I may not be entirely... comfortable with what we’re doing here, but he didn’t deserve that. I like the kids, and what happened to Sam...”—he glanced up at the empty monitor again—“it was horrible. I’m just... I just trying to figure out what happened, that’s all.”

  Or trying to cover your back.

  The thought came from nowhere. At first I thought Olive had said it, but my assistant remained tight-lipped, glowering at the technician’s back.

  “Okay,” I said, trying to calm the situation. “Okay. Can you compile a report?”

  Lam looked puzzled. “A report?”

  “Everything that’s happened, step by step. It might help... make sense of this.”

  While keeping you nice and busy, fat boy.

  I frowned. What was wrong with me? Was it time for more meds already? My mouth was dry, my throat raw. I licked my lips. It was just the pressure of the day, everything that had happened. I knew that Olive had shifted her gaze to me now, assessing my condition, my risk. I concentrated on Lam.

  Hold it together, girl, my mother said in my ear. You can do this. I know you can.

  An electronic buzz made all of us jump, the walkie-talkie at my hip crackling.

  “Dr Tomas?”

  I blew out in shock, snatching the handset from its belt-clip.

  “Yes, chief?”

  “Where are you?”

  “In the hub.”

  “The hub?”

  “I’ll explain later. Is everything all right.”