Doomsday

by Chris Morphew

  ‘Turn on your speakerphone,’ Calvin ordered.

  ‘Nine.’

  ‘Why?’ I said.

  ‘Eight.’

  ‘Do it, Luke!’ Jordan called in the background.

  ‘Seven.’

  I pulled the phone away from my ear.

  ‘Six.’

  Scanned the keypad, trying to figure out where the speakerphone button even was.

  ‘Five.’

  Reeve lurched towards the door.

  ‘Four.’

  Lazarro dived, thrusting a hand between the railings on the stairs.

  ‘Three.’

  He grabbed at Reeve, fist clenching on his collar.

  ‘Two.’

  I ducked under his outstretched arm, thumb finally coming down on the right button.

  ‘One –’

  ‘– DOWN!’ Calvin roared, managing to sound loud and commanding even over the tinny speaker. ‘REPEAT: STAND DOWN!’

  Stunned silence, broken only by muffled sobbing from outside. I crept to the door, cranking up the volume as high as it would go.

  Finally, the guard called Justin spoke up. ‘Chief …?’

  ‘I’m sending Luke Hunter out with the phone,’ said Calvin. ‘Ensure that he is not harmed.’

  ‘Jordan?’ I whispered, switching off the speakerphone for a second and holding the phone to my ear.

  There was a pause as Calvin handed the phone back.

  ‘It’s okay,’ said Jordan, clearly trying to sound more convinced than she actually was. ‘Do what he says.’

  I looked back at Reeve, still in Lazarro’s clutches, tears streaming down his face. He nodded.

  ‘O-okay,’ I said, steeling myself, turning the speaker back on. ‘Okay, I’m coming out. Nobody shoot anyone.’

  I shoved the wreck of the door aside and stepped into the doorway. A woman with dark, curly hair stared back at me, red-eyed, white-faced, shaking in the grip of a heavy-set guy with a pistol jammed up under her chin. Two more guards stood out in the rain, aiming rifles through the lounge-room window.

  ‘Matt!’ Katie screamed, catching sight of Reeve. ‘Don’t let them –’

  ‘SILENCE!’ Calvin demanded.

  I scanned the street. So far, it was just the three of them (plus maybe one more around the back), but the gunfire would attract others.

  ‘Sir,’ said the guard holding Reeve’s wife, ‘Officer Collins speaking. Shackleton’s orders were to find these men and return them to base for questioning.’

  ‘Do you think this is news to me, Collins?’ Calvin asked.

  ‘No, sir,’ said Collins quickly. ‘I – I just didn’t realise you were back on duty.’

  ‘I am ordering an emergency meeting of all security personnel,’ said Calvin. ‘Return to the Shackleton Building immediately.’

  Collins stared at me, bewildered. He wasn’t an idiot. He could see that something about all this wasn’t adding up, but he knew better than to question Calvin.

  The two other guards edged closer to the house, straining to listen in.

  I held my breath, waiting for it all to fall apart.

  ‘Sir,’ said Collins, ‘I have Officer Reeve and a number of his fellow rebels here with me. If you would be willing to send in some additional forces –’

  ‘Officer Collins,’ said Calvin fiercely, ‘if I find myself in need of your tactical advice, I will ask for it.’

  ‘Y-yes, sir.’ Collins glanced back at his companions.

  They shrugged back at him, confused and frustrated.

  And then, just in case we didn’t have enough men with guns around, I spotted three more figures in black emerging from a side street, over the road. Half a minute, and they’d be right –

  BLAM!

  The window shattered behind me, showering the verandah with glass.

  Officer Collins staggered. Blood poured from the side of his head. He crumpled to the ground, pulling Katie down with him. I dived behind them as the guards on the lawn returned fire, their rifles pointed back up at the lounge room. Katie cried out in horror, crashing into me as she scrambled from the limp form of Officer Collins.

  Calvin’s voice was still bellowing out of the phone, but I couldn’t make out a word of it. I twisted around, deafened by gunfire, and caught a blur of movement as a little metal canister came sailing out of the window. It bounced off the railing and clanked back down onto the verandah.

  I cringed away, thinking it was a grenade or something, but the explosion never came. Instead, with a loud hissing sound, the thing started spewing out thick black smoke, rattling around on the ground with the force of its own spray. Smoke filled the verandah, spilling out in all directions, across the yard and through the house, pouring into my eyes and nose and mouth.

  Someone was still firing. The noise ricocheted in my head, everywhere at once.

  Katie brushed past me, already on her feet. ‘Matt!’

  I staggered up after her, blind, eyes streaming. But the upside to a town full of identical houses was that it was pretty easy to find your way through one in the dark. I ran inside, ducking for cover, and stumbled down the hallway.

  ‘Everybody out!’ bellowed Lazarro, still somewhere above me. ‘Go! Go! Go!’

  I kept going, through the house and out the alreadyopen back door, almost tripping down the steps. Smoke billowed out after me, clouding the yard, but it was thinner here, a grey haze instead of total darkness.

  A figure stalked through the murk at the other end of the yard. It turned, catching sight of me. I dropped onto all fours, just as –

  BLAM! BLAM!

  The bullets whooshed past, swirling the smoke above my head. There was a shout from the house and someone else returned fire. How could they even tell who they were shooting at?

  I shrank down, crawling away through the long grass, not stopping until I reached the back fence. I looked back. Someone was coming. I jumped up, vaulted over the fence, and ran.

  THURSDAY, AUGUST 13, 7.58 A.M. 9 HOURS, 2 MINUTES

  He’s okay, I told myself, like thinking it could make it true. He’s okay. He got out.

  But the sound of gunfire still rattled in my head. Luke hadn’t called back, and I hadn’t called him for fear of giving up his hiding place, or running down the battery.

  I trudged through the mud, trying to busy my mind with the work of carrying explosives.

  The wall was bigger than I remembered. A massive expanse of concrete, stretching forever in both directions, towering over our heads. It encircled the town, a line marking out the reach of the fallout. Towering bush on this side, barren wasteland on the other.

  Last time had been easy enough. We’d just climbed a tree and thrown a rope over the side. But now that the shield grid had come bursting out of the wall, electrified cords slashing and burning through any tree tall enough to get in their way, things were a bit more complicated.

  The sun was brighter overhead now, the shield grid even more ominous for being able to see it properly. Dark lines crisscrossed the grey sky, making this whole place feel, if possible, even more like a prison. The rain had eased off a little bit, but we were all so soaked through by now that it didn’t really make any difference.

  I picked up another box of explosives, lugging it through the rain towards a pair of gleaming silver doors: the hidden access point Reeve and the others had used to run their patrols to the outside, back in the day.

  Calvin crouched in front of the giant doors, mounting explosives and connecting wires. Once upon a time, he could’ve just keyed a code and popped the doors open automatically, but somewhere along the line, Shackleton had locked him in with the rest of us.

  He took the box from my hands, and I felt a twinge of something that felt bizarrely like solidarity.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘For trying to get them out of there. That was …’

  Calvin nodded slowly and then got back to work. I went back to the skid for the last box, an unwelcome thought gnawing at me. I was starting to trust him
.

  How was I starting to trust him?

  Amy was in the driver’s seat, taking care of Tobias. After the incident with the gun, Calvin had decided that that was the best place for her. Amy had been too shaken up by the whole thing to argue, and I was more than happy to actually get up and do something.

  ‘How is he?’ I asked, leaning in to check on Tobias.

  ‘Yeah, fine,’ said Amy. ‘Sleeping.’

  ‘Listen, thanks for –’

  ‘What do you think he’s going to have to do when we get out there?’ Amy cut in. ‘I mean, what can he do? Sleep Tabitha to death?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘But you really believe Calvin’s going to show you.’

  I grabbed the final box of explosives from the cage, flicking my head to shake back a stray dreadlock. ‘I don’t know.’

  I returned to the wall, dropped off the last of the explosives, and watched as Calvin set them in place.

  What if this really was all just wishful thinking? What if my desperation to get out there and save the world had blinded me to some crucial detail that might have let me in on what Calvin was really doing here?

  Or what if it was even simpler than that? What if Shackleton was just running down the clock? With only hours left until the end, what if he’d just sent Calvin out here to keep me distracted until it was too late?

  But if that was true, why Calvin of all people? And why even bother when he could have just shot me or taken me prisoner? What wasn’t I seeing?

  ‘We’re going to have to leave her behind,’ Calvin said, without looking up at me.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Amy,’ he said. ‘Once we get the doors open, we’re –’

  ‘No. We’re not.’ I crouched down, glancing back to make sure she hadn’t heard. ‘She’s coming with us.’

  Calvin bent down lower, plugging something into one of the wads of explosive. ‘She’s too unpredictable.’

  ‘She’s too unpredictable?’

  ‘You and I have a job to do –’

  ‘Right, that secret job you won’t even –’

  ‘– and we cannot afford to take unnecessary risks,’ Calvin steamrolled on, finally stopping to look at me.

  ‘I will not allow the integrity of this operation to be compromised by a reckless rogue element.’

  ‘By someone who might shoot you, you mean?’

  ‘And what if I had been shot?’ Calvin snapped. ‘What then?’

  ‘You weren’t,’ I said. ‘And you won’t be. She was just trying to get your attention.’

  ‘Are you sure of that? Are you willing to stake the lives of all humanity on her co-operation?’

  I opened my mouth to defend her and found that I couldn’t get the words out. How was it that I was having a conversation with Calvin about whether someone else could be trusted with the future of humanity?

  ‘Do you think you’re safe from this?’ Calvin asked. ‘Do you think your family is safe if we fail today? If the effects of the fallout have truly been undone, what does that say for your immunity to Tabitha?’

  A chill ran through me, deeper than anything the rain or the cold could reach. The question had been there all along, but I’d mostly managed not to let myself think about it.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘Neither do I,’ said Calvin. ‘And I would prefer not to find out.’ His eyes were filling up with what looked amazingly like genuine compassion. ‘Amy is as safe here as anywhere. We’ll pick her up on our way back. And by then, with any luck …’ He wiped his hands on his pants and stretched upright. ‘Come on. We’re ready here.’

  He started back towards the skid, apparently assuming he’d talked me around. And maybe he had.

  I fell into step behind him, still conflicted, but no longer convinced he was wrong. I told myself it wasn’t a question of loyalty. I’d back Amy over Calvin every single time. But as long as they were together, there’d be conflict. And Calvin was right: we couldn’t afford it.

  Amy got up from the driver’s seat as we approached, handing Tobias back to me. Calvin jumped behind the wheel and threw the skid into reverse. ‘Follow me. Everyone get back to a safe distance.’

  I took one last look back at the wall and hurried after him.

  Calvin parked the skid, leapt out, and bobbed down behind it, pulling out a little remote-control thing. I crouched behind one of the giant front tyres, draping Tobias’s blanket over his face and crossing my arms around his back.

  ‘Stay down,’ Calvin warned, flipping a little cap up from the detonator.

  He pushed the button, and the whole wall vanished in a hurricane of orange light. The explosion roared through the bush, fierce, bloodthirsty, devouring everything with churning flames and a rushing wind, scorching my rain-drenched skin and hammering me into the ground and rocking the skid so hard I thought it was going to roll over on top of us. Debris rained down, exploded trees and hunks of wet earth.

  And then it was over.

  I sat up, ash and dirt cascading from my body, and pulled back the blanket to check on Tobias. He just yawned at me, like he did this kind of thing all the time.

  ‘You call that a safe distance?’ Amy grumbled.

  Calvin ducked away to see what was left of the wall. I brushed the worst of the dirt off Tobias and jogged to catch up.

  Twenty metres in, we reached the clearing created by the explosion. Light glowed through the smoke as the trees around the edge crackled with flames. The ground was uneven, ripped apart by the blast. I tried to make out how much damage had been done to the shield grid, but everything I could see was still intact.

  Calvin squinted at the smoke, which was finally beginning to clear. A gust of wind whipped by, clearing a path in front of us, and Calvin stepped back like he’d been slapped. He swore under his breath, and I felt dread crash through me with even more force than the explosion.

  ‘No way …’ breathed Amy, coming up behind us.

  The doors were still there. Scorched black, but still looming over us. Undamaged. Unmoved.

  Nine hours until the end of the world, and our last hope of saving it had just gone up in smoke.

  THURSDAY, AUGUST 13, 8.13 A.M. 8 HOURS, 47 MINUTES

  I stretched above the low line of the picket fence, risking a glance out at the bush, and then dropped back down again, heart pummelling my chest. The darkness was long gone now, and every movement I made felt like taunting death.

  Mrs Weir knelt in the grass beside me. She was the only one I’d found since abandoning the house. I’d run into her behind the primary school and almost smashed her over the head with a tree branch.

  Together, we’d made our way down to the south end of town, agonisingly slow as we dodged the pairs of guards who were combing the streets, rounding up escapees. That was definitely not good news. If security were free enough to start sending out search parties, then we had to be pretty much back to square one in the Shackleton Building.

  Already, whatever resistance there’d been out across the town was now nearly stamped out, everyone lying low or escaped into the bush or recaptured or worse. I thought of Lauren and the others we’d left behind this morning. What would happen to them when security came knocking?

  ‘We should never have left you,’ murmured Mrs Weir, eyes to the ground.

  I turned to look at her. A cold breeze swept through, rustling the grass around our shoulders.

  Mrs Weir sniffled, the ratty nurse uniform she was wearing still sticking to her skin with the rain. ‘The night at the medical centre,’ she said, ‘when Brian and I got ourselves captured. We knew Peter was sick. We knew he needed us, but we ran off on that fool’s errand and look where it got us.’

  My insides squirmed. What was I supposed to say to that? What words could possibly make any kind of difference to someone who’d just lost their kid?

  Dad would know. Somehow, he always knew what to say in situations like this.

  ‘You were trying to help,�
�� I said. ‘You were doing what you thought was best for all of us, including Peter.’

  ‘It was reckless,’ she said. ‘Stupid. Trying to spy on Shackleton when our son was sick and imprisoned. If we’d just stayed behind, we could have …’ She sank lower in the grass, eyes red.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘You couldn’t – I know you love him.

  But even if you were there … No-one could’ve stopped what happened to Peter. And like I told you, he did get better. Before – before the end. He was better.’

  I bobbed up again, no idea if she’d taken anything in. No idea if I’d actually said anything worth taking in.

  Mrs Weir didn’t move. She’d been like this the whole time. Dazed. Sluggish. One foot in reality, and the other one a thousand miles away.

  ‘C’mon,’ I said, sweat pricking the back of my neck. I pulled her up and we started into the bush, heading for Reeve’s truck and whoever was still alive to meet us.

  ‘How did it happen?’ asked Mrs Weir. I could see her steeling herself for the answer. ‘How did he …?’

  She faltered, unable to finish, and the storm in my stomach intensified. There was no right answer. Nothing that would even come close to capturing the convoluted mess of the last twenty-four hours.

  ‘He was brave,’ I said, surprised by the sudden flare of emotion as I said the words. Whatever else he’d been, Peter had started out as a friend. ‘He died trying to do what was right. He stood up to maybe his worst enemy in this whole place, and he was – he was killed. Murdered. But it wasn’t for nothing.’

  Mrs Weir nodded, a kind of miserable gratitude on her face.

  ‘I know that’s not a whole answer,’ I said. ‘It’s all – I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to explain it all completely. But I’ll try. When all this is over, I promise I’ll answer as much as I can.’

  I flinched as Galton’s phone started buzzing in my pocket.

  Bruce Calvin.

  ‘Jordan?’ I said, sliding the phone open.

  A sigh of relief at the other end of the line. ‘What happened back there?’

  ‘Someone started shooting,’ I said, the sound of her voice calming my nerves a bit. ‘But we’re out now. At least –’