Havoc

by Higgins, Jane

  ‘You turned Fy,’ he said. ‘I won’t forgive that.’

  I put my head down, hands on knees, and tried to breathe. When I had air enough I said, ‘Wasn’t me. It was all her.’

  ‘Bullshit! She was never like that before.’

  ‘Yeah, she was.’ I found a tree to prop me up. ‘We never noticed, that’s all.’ Before he could object I said, ‘She’s her own person, you moron. She’s not gonna do what someone says just because they’re in charge or they’re giving the orders that day.’

  ‘Had a nice cosy time over the river, did you?’

  ‘Looking for Sol? Sure. It was a bundle of laughs.’

  Then it dawned on me what he meant. I straightened up.

  ‘Is that what you’re aggro about? You think we got together over the river?’

  He didn’t say anything but his gaze slid away.

  I said, ‘Well, I’m sorry to set whatever mind you have at rest, but we didn’t.’

  His eyebrows went up, and then came the smirk again. ‘Just friends, then.’

  ‘As if that’s a small thing. You know fuck-all. Can we get going?’

  We arrived at last way out on the eastern fenceline, at a boring-looking building that I took to be a storehouse. But inside we went downstairs through a series of doors that Jono had the codes for, and two levels down the place opened up into a maze of corridors and labs. We stopped outside a double set of doors in an airlock arrangement so that you went through the first one and waited for it to close before you could open the second. There should have been biohazard suits hanging in there, but I guess they’d suddenly become valuable and someone had filched them.

  Behind me Jono pressed an intercom switch. ‘Visitor for you,’ he said and opened the first door. I went in and peered through the window in the next door. Lanya came straight up to it, eyes wide, hands on the glass.

  I punched the door button to go in. Nothing happened. Pushed it again. Still nothing.

  I turned round to Jono saying, ‘You want me to go in or don’t you?’

  But the door back to him was shut. And locked. I yelled and pounded on it. He smiled at me, tapped the glass and went away. I found the intercom.

  ‘Lanya? Can you hear me?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Can you open this door?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Find the intercom switch,’ I said.

  She looked around and found something, pressed it and I heard her voice. ‘Nik! Get me out of here!’

  ‘I’m trying,’ I said.

  I levered the cover off the elock and peered at its insides. Then I realised something important and looked back at her.

  ‘Hurry!’ she said. ‘What’s the matter?’

  I was looking into her eyes and she was looking right back with all the smarts I knew she had.

  ‘You’re supposed to be all drugged up.’ I was starting to smile.

  She shook her head. ‘They gave me one injection early on and that’s all. Hurry, Nik. There are bodies in cages.’

  ‘Cages?’

  ‘Hurry!’

  ‘I’m trying, I’m trying. Don’t touch anything.’

  ‘I said a crossing prayer for them. They’re just kids. Please hurry!’

  I was looking at the elock innards, still puzzling over what she’d said.

  ‘Did you say one injection?’ Then I remembered what Jono had said about Dash. ‘Did you see Dash?’

  ‘Wasting your time,’ said Jono’s voice. I spun round to see where he was. ‘Look up!’ he said.

  ‘Up?’ I stared round my small airlock space. Then Lanya knocked on the glass and pointed. And there he was, in the observation window high in the wall of the room she was in.

  His voice came through my intercom and presumably hers as well.

  ‘Dash went soft, like I said. You won’t open that door. There’s a master control here that overrides it.’

  ‘What are you doing?’ I said.

  ‘Justice,’ he said. ‘I’m doing justice. I lost Fyffe cos of you. Now you get to find out what that’s like.’

  I think my heart stopped, then it started again with a thump and went full-on like someone had rammed a lever up to maximum.

  ‘Jono—’

  ‘Shut up! Ever seen anyone die of a nerve agent?’

  ‘Christ, Jono!’

  ‘Thought not. Watch closely then.’

  CHAPTER 32

  I switched off the intercom to Jono so he couldn’t hear me and covered the cc-eye so he couldn’t see me, then said to Lanya, ‘Go find a biohazard suit. They must have an emergency one in there somewhere.’

  ‘What are you doing?’ she asked.

  ‘Calling the cavalry.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘Just go!’

  I switched the intercom between Jono and me back on and heard him saying, ‘Uncover that camera!’

  I was hunting through the multi-device I’d taken earlier in the day searching for a comms contact for Dash. I could hear Jono clattering about, swearing under his breath. It sounded like he’d discovered that he couldn’t simply plug a cannister of nerve gas into the relevant airvent and flick a switch. File that under hope: faint but real.

  I found Bannister, Ashleigh at last and started to type a message to her. But where the hell were we? The Marsh and its stupid anonymous buildings.

  I closed my eyes and went back to the path we’d walked down, saw the building as we came to it, saw the door that Jono opened: there was a number above it—a code instead of a sign for whatever happened in that building. Got it. Typed: Store 36C–P1, Level G minus 2. Speed or death. Seriously. N. Pressed SEND. Prayed.

  ‘Uncover that camera,’ yelled Jono.

  Speed or death was a game we had played at Tornmoor—its real name was probably something like Tactical Training Exercise No. 48. But we didn’t know then that the security services ran the school—all we knew was that they came every year to recruit the best of the senior students—Jono, for example, and Dash.

  In fact, there was nothing tactical about that game; it was just brute speed over an impromptu obstacle course through the buildings and grounds of the school. If you didn’t make it in time you were ‘dead’. As the game went on the time for each run got shorter and shorter—everyone was ‘dead’ by the end.

  I looked through the glass to see what Lanya was doing, but I couldn’t see the whole room and I couldn’t see her. I typed a second, longer message to Dash and talked to Jono.

  ‘You want to burn your entire career on a single act of revenge? Nothing happened between Fy and me. We helped each other out, that’s all.’

  Lanya appeared at my window. I turned off comms to Jono.

  ‘I found a cupboard,’ she said. ‘It’s got a symbol on it, could be a bio-suit, but it’s locked.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I’ll try and find a code for it.’

  I dived into the multi-device again and switched Jono back on.
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  ‘Remember chemistry class?’ he was saying. ‘Remember nerve agents?’

  Yes, I remembered nerve agents. But they were just fodder for assessment then.

  ‘Remember what they do to people? Are you listening to me?’

  ‘Yes, I’m listening.’

  ‘I found them. The nerve agent cannisters. I found where they’re stored, and I’m going to get one. Don’t go away!’

  I wasn’t sure whether to believe him. I’d been hearing a lot of keyboard activity up there. With luck, he needed a code he didn’t have to get what he wanted. Same as me.

  I went back to the multi, trawling through layers of the Marsh: departments, operations, special projects. I shut out everything else: Jono crowing upstairs, Lanya standing staunch on the other side of the door, Dash running—please God, running—this way. I shut it all out and searched for this room on the multi. For the location of the emergency suit inside the cabinet inside the room. For the code that would unlock it. It had to be there. Every problem-solving, code-breaking, proof-finding effort I’d ever made I poured into the search for that code.

  I couldn’t find it.

  As far as the multi was concerned the room Lanya was in didn’t exist. The emergency cabinet didn’t exist. The bio-suit inside it didn’t exist. Lanya put a hand on the glass.

  ‘Nik, I can’t wait for you. I’m going up there.’

  She’d pulled a fire extinguisher off the wall and was wrapping it in a sheet she’d found.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I said.

  She stood up. ‘Making a harness. Gonna climb a cage and smash that window.’

  I looked up at the window, thought it would be reinforced glass, but didn’t say so.

  She hauled on her makeshift sheet harness and strapped the extinguisher to her back, adjusted it, tightened it.

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘It’ll be reinforced, maybe even bullet proof. But d’you think he knows that? Even if he does, d’you think he’ll risk it?’ She looked at me—bright, fierce, so beautiful—and smiled. ‘Wish me luck!’

  I laughed, despite it all.

  ‘Hey!’ yelled Jono. ‘I’m back! Look!’ We both looked up to see him holding a small cannister. ‘Here it is!’

  Lanya ran for the cage directly beneath the window and started to scramble up it. She was halfway there before Jono noticed what she was doing and then even he stopped to watch her. She reached the top, hauled herself onto it and crawled carefully across the mesh until she could stand up and almost look him in the eye. She took off the harness and tied the extinguisher into it so she could swing it at him.

  The grin left Jono’s face. They stood glaring at each other, daring each other.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ he said.

  ‘You’ll die,’ I said.

  ‘So will she.’

  Keep talking, I thought. Never my strong point.

  ‘Did you calibrate the canister size to the room size?’ I said.

  No answer.

  I bet you didn’t, I thought. I had no idea if it mattered—probably the canister was easily big enough for a lethal contamination of the whole room, but I was chasing any nanosecond of doubt and delay I could catch.

  ‘Fuck you,’ he said. ‘Say your prayers.’

  CHAPTER 33

  I yelled something wordless and desperate.

  Jono yelled too, but not at me. Dash’s voice came through the intercom.

  ‘Stand down, Jono! Jono! Stand down or I will shoot you.’

  ‘You’re a joke,’ he sneered.

  ‘You think?’ she said. The intercom blared a wild burst of static and Jono yelped a short, sharp scream.

  I heard Dash again, crisp, all business.

  ‘Nik? He’s down. Are you there?’

  I breathed. ‘Yes,’ my voice shaken loose in my throat.

  ‘Speed or death! For real this time. You won’t believe the obstacle course out there right now.’ She paused and peered through the window. ‘What is this place? What’s going on?’

  ‘Let me in there.’

  ‘Hold on.’

  ‘Now, Dash!’

  ‘In a second. I’m looking for the door release.’

  She was poring over what must have been a console and peering into the room.

  ‘Did you shoot him?’ I asked.

  ‘No, tasered. I’ve cuffed him and he won’t move for a while.’

  Lanya had left the sheet and the fire extinguisher on the top of the cage and was climbing down.

  I kicked the door. ‘Dash! Hurry up.’

  ‘All right, all right! There! Go!’

  The lock clicked, the door slid and I ran into a wall of warm air so stale and stinking it made me gag. The room was a festering sore: lines of cages reached up to the level of the observation window whose white rectangle of light outshone the dim fluoro tubes way above our heads. The air was rank with disinfectant, sweat and sewage and something else: the sweet stink I’d known in Moldam—bodies decomposing in the heat.

  Lanya had reached the floor and sagged into a crouch, head bowed. She was shaking and breathing hard. I crouched beside her, lifted the braids off her face. They were dripping with sweat.

  She turned away. ‘Gonna throw up.’

  She took a deep breath, held it, blew it out, shuddering. She turned back to me.

  ‘No. I’m all right.’ She gave me a bleak almost-smile and started to get to her feet. I put out a hand to help but she turned away. ‘No. Don’t touch me.’

  ‘Hey.’

  ‘I’m okay, but…’ Her eyes were dark and wide and dazed. Her face shone with sweat and she was clinging to the wire of the cage to stay upright. ‘They’re all dead. I called to them and none of them moved. I tried not to touch them, but I had to see. Their skin is all bruises and their eyes…their eyes are full of blood—’

  She stopped to catch her breath.

  ‘Take it easy,’ I said. ‘We’re getting out of here now.’

  ‘No, you don’t understand.’ Her voice was shaking. ‘They’ve been shot.’

  ‘Jesus. What?’

  ‘A bullet to the head, every one of them. Someone must have panicked when the looting started, they couldn’t let infected people get outside. They’re sick with something terrible, or they were. This is what’s coming to Moldam, Nik! That agent—the one who brought me here—that’s what he told me.’

  ‘Stop. Take my hand.’

  She shook her head. ‘I’ve been in here for hours—I’ve breathed the air and bent over bodies and touched that sheet. The sickness will be in me now. You can’t touch me. You mustn’t.’

  ‘At least let’s get out of here?’

  She nodded and let go of the cage, but then swayed where she stood and began to fold.

  I caught her as she fell and held her while she vomited a stream of something pale and thin; she spat the last of it out, gasping, and wiped her mouth. She was shivering in short spasms and breathing with effort. I turned he
r towards me, put her head on my shoulder and held her.

  It was whole minutes before she stopped shaking. Then she lifted her head to look at me. I kissed her forehead and, lightly, her lips.

  She pulled back and whispered, ‘Why did you do that? What if I’m sick?’

  ‘Why do you think? Can you stand?’

  She nodded, and we left the room at last, but for a long time after that my skin crawled with the heat and stink of it.

  Upstairs, the observation area was empty—Dash had taken Jono away. The room wasn’t much wider than its window and only half a dozen paces deep; it seemed that its sole purpose was as a place to watch lab rats perform and/or die. A bank of screens and controls took up half the space beneath the window, a table with chairs the other half. There was also a large paper shredder at the back with a pile of shreds underneath it and its red light blinking. Someone had been busy. I sat down at the console: the computer was logged in—thank you, Jono—and gave me access to much more than I’d got from the multi-device. I hunted through the system looking for anything that might point us in the direction of the vaccine, preferably roomfuls of the stuff that would be enough for us and all of Moldam. Lanya leaned against the desk beside me, watching my face.

  ‘Suppose I’m infected,’ she said. ‘You could be too, now.’

  ‘Like it was your fault you ended up in there?’

  I went back to the screen. ‘Look at this. It’s a map of this place. But now what? Labs? Would they keep the vaccine in labs? Or storerooms? What about storerooms attached to labs? Or storerooms miles away from labs to hide them better? Or,’ I sat back, ‘none of the above because it’s all so freakin’ secret that only Frieda knows for sure?’

  ‘What good’s a vaccine if we’re already sick?’

  ‘If we get it early enough—Raffael told me—if we get it early enough, we stand a good chance of not dying.’