‘Is everyone okay?’
‘I don’t know. We got separated. I’m heading back now to see if I can find the others. Where are you guys?’
‘We’re at the wall,’ she said. ‘Calvin tried to blow open the exit, but it didn’t work, and now –’
Calvin barked something at her, but I couldn’t make it out over the sound of the engine behind them.
‘Need to be quick,’ said Jordan. ‘Phone’s going to die any minute.’ Her voice was steady, but I’d learnt to hear when she was trying not to panic. ‘We can’t get through the wall. Calvin says the only way out is over. We need you to shut down the shield grid.’
I looked up at the sky, at that massive, kilometreswide structure that could shred military aircraft into smoke and rubble. ‘How exactly …?’
‘Shackleton’s the only one with access to the control systems,’ said Jordan. ‘You’re going to need to get up onto the roof of the Shackleton Building and physically bring it down.’
‘The roof of the Shackleton Building,’ I repeated.
‘I know. I know it’s crazy, but –’
‘It’s all crazy,’ I said. ‘Yeah. I’ll try.’
‘Did Reeve’s guys in the truck make it back to you?’ asked Jordan. ‘Have you got any explosives or anything?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Probably.’
‘Okay, good. Calvin says the only way to knock out the grid by force is to destroy that antenna on top of the Shackleton Building that holds all the cords togeth–’
The phone beeped in my ear. She was gone. Battery finally dead.
Mrs Weir glanced over at me with the closest thing to focus I’d seen since we met up. Then a shout up ahead ripped her attention away again.
‘Jess!’ Mr Weir charged out, almost knocking Mrs Weir over in a ferocious hug.
There were others milling around behind him, gathered together in a little clearing in the trees. Reeve had got his wife out. The two of them were deep in a hushed conversation with Lazarro. Chew and Wilson were here too, and Hamilton, Lauren’s dad, plus two new faces – the guys who’d been back here guarding the truck, I guessed.
‘Any sign of the others?’ I asked Mr Weir. ‘There should be like three more of us, right?’
‘Not anymore,’ he said darkly. He forced a smile, clapping a hand to my shoulder. ‘Glad you’re okay, mate.’
‘Yeah. You too.’
I turned away, crossing the clearing to talk to Reeve.
He saw me coming, whispered something to Lazarro and Katie, and they backed off, leaving us alone.
‘Mate,’ said Reeve, pulling me out of earshot of everyone else. ‘I need you to tell me exactly what’s going on out there with Jordan and Calvin.’ He stared at me with absolute focus, like hearing the answer was the most important thing in the whole world. Maybe it was.
‘I don’t know,’ I said uneasily. ‘I mean, they’re trying to get out to the release station. Jordan says Calvin’s trying to help them.’
‘And you believe that?’ said Reeve.
‘No,’ I said automatically. ‘I mean, of course I don’t. But –’ ‘But how else do you explain what happened back at the house?’ Reeve finished. ‘And how do you explain him letting our guys go free when he caught them out at the armoury?’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘Wait. What?’
‘Kirke’s been telling me what happened out there,’ said Reeve, nodding at one of the guards I hadn’t met yet. ‘Crazy story about Calvin ordering his men to stand down and let them go. Anyway, you were saying …’
‘They’re at the wall,’ I said. ‘Calvin tried to blast through, but I guess it didn’t work. He needs us to take down the shield grid so they can get over the top.’
Reeve’s gaze drifted up to the grid.
‘We’re going to do it, right?’ I said. ‘I mean, we have to. If Jordan doesn’t get out there by five …’
Reeve frowned, dark shadows under his eyes. It had been way too long since any of us had slept. He caught Lazarro’s eye, cocking his head out at the bush. Lazarro nodded and started rounding everyone up.
‘My gut still says Calvin can’t be trusted,’ said Reeve finally, leading the way out of the clearing. ‘But you’re right. We’re down to the wire here. We might not have the luxury of only working with people we know we can trust.’
We’d reached the truck. Reeve and Lazarro did a quick circuit to make sure we were alone, and then Kirke rolled open the back door of the truck.
I peered inside. The truck was pretty packed, but it was hard to make out what was in there past the skid unit parked inside the door. Reeve’s eyes widened. He climbed inside and twisted past the skid, making his way into the back to take stock.
‘Uh … question,’ said Chew, raising an eyebrow. ‘You know this skid unit you have here? This smaller, faster, more manoeuvrable vehicle with the handy cage at the back for transporting equipment? Any reason why you didn’t just –?’
‘Didn’t have a whole lot of choice,’ said Kirke, who apparently had about as much patience for Chew as Lazarro did. ‘The boys at the armoury were suspicious enough when we showed up unannounced. Had to make things look as routine as possible.’
‘Any more stupid questions?’ Lazarro asked. ‘Or shall we get to work?’
‘Right,’ said Reeve, reappearing from inside before the bickering could take off. ‘We’ve eaten up too much time already.’ He dropped down in front of the skid, legs dangling over the side of the truck, and clapped his hands together. ‘Here’s what we know: five o’clock tonight, Tabitha gets out and the whole world bites the dust. Maybe us as well. Shackleton knows we’re out here, but he also knows there’s nothing we can do about Tabitha while the shield grid’s still up.’
‘And nothing we can do about the shield grid while we’re stuck out here,’ I said.
‘Exactly,’ said Reeve. ‘Which means smart money for him is on just hunkering down in the Shackleton Building and running out the clock.’
‘So we’re screwed,’ Chew summarised. ‘Yeah. We knew that already.’
Reeve rubbed his eyes. ‘Not quite. Way I see it, we’ve got two shots left, and I reckon we’ve got to take them both at once. First, we get to the roof. Take out the shield grid. Free Jordan up to get out to the release station and deal with Tabitha.’
I shot him a grateful look. A few other glances fired around the circle too. We hadn’t actually told the rest of Reeve’s men that Jordan and Calvin were road tripping out to the release station together, but it looked like some of them were starting to fill in the blanks.
‘Second,’ Reeve pushed on, ‘we go after Shackleton.
Make him turn the countdown back himself.’
‘You really think that’s going to happen?’ said Wilson.
‘Not without a fight,’ said Reeve, ‘which is why we have to play it smart. Retake the loyalty room first. Use that to leverage more support to our side. There’s enough of us now, we should be able to hold it.’
‘Hang on,’ said Hamilton, ‘where’s the part where we rescue our families?’
‘I’ve just told it to you,’ said Reeve. ‘Listen, we’ve all still got people we care about in there, but if we’re going to do this, we need to do it right. Blindly running in and grabbing our families gets us nowhere unless we get the rest done first.’
‘Okay, sure, but aren’t we getting a bit ahead of ourselves here?’ asked Chew. ‘I mean, as much fun as all that sounds, how are we even planning on getting inside in the first place?’
‘Calvin’s locked down all the tunnels,’ I said. ‘We’re not getting in that way again.’
Reeve nodded. ‘I think we might be past taking the subtle approach. If we want to get in there, I’d say we’re gonna need to be a little bit more direct this time. Straight in the front before they see us coming.’
‘One more stupid question,’ said Chew, raising his hand. ‘As genius as walking in through the front doors might sound, isn’t there an outside c
hance someone might think to shoot us full of holes on the way in?’
‘Yep. That’s why we won’t be walking.’ Reeve reached behind to pat the giant tyre of the skid unit. ‘This time, we’re taking the car.’
THURSDAY, AUGUST 13, 9.32 A.M. 7 HOURS, 28 MINUTES
I glared up at the wall, hands pressed against the wet concrete, shaking with the frustration and the cold, adrenaline charging inside of me with nowhere to go.
The others were behind me with Tobias, still in the skid. We’d driven around to what Calvin had decided was a safe distance from the site of the explosion, then pulled up to wait for Luke to knock out the shield grid.
Calvin had suggested that Amy could take the skid back into town to investigate his progress. Amy had suggested that Calvin could go screw himself. Since then, there’d been silence.
It had been hours. At least, it had felt like hours; Calvin’s phone had been our last way of keeping track of time. I’d paced. I’d punched the wall. I’d climbed trees and watched the shield grid vaporise anything I threw into the gaps. Anything to work out the nervous energy, to keep pretending I still had some kind of control over the situation.
None of it helped. This was out of my hands, and I knew it.
And, worse than that, with the end of the fallout, I felt like I’d lost the one thing that had ever given me any kind of edge in this fight.
For so long now, I’d been carried along on the strength of the visions that the fallout had handed down to me. Visions that had seemed almost hand-picked to nudge us along in the right direction, to keep us crawling forward towards some kind of solution to all this.
The fallout was what had brought us all out here in the first place. If I had my time-travel paradoxes straight, the fallout had even brought itself out here, using the portal-creating abilities it had given me to disperse itself over Phoenix, way back in the beginning.
It was the fallout that had caused Calvin’s (alleged) miraculous change of heart. And it was the fallout that had brought Tobias into the world six months ahead of schedule, holding him up as the cure against the end of humanity.
But now the fallout was gone. And all the freakish mutations it had created were gone with it.
Where did that leave us? Whatever Tobias was meant to do, could he even still do it?
I dug my nails into the concrete. A cable as thick as a tree branch arched over my head – one of the cords that made up the shield grid. You saw the hugeness of the thing in a whole new way at this distance.
Luke is dealing with it, I told myself. We’re going to get out there. We’re meant to get out there. Tobias is still the answer. He has to be.
But if there really was some greater purpose at work here – something that, like Amy had said, wasn’t neutral about how this all played out – then why had it let any of this happen in the first place? The only reason the world needed saving was that Shackleton had been drawn out here by the same fallout that had caused all the rest of it.
I started pacing again.
‘Save your energy,’ said Calvin from his perch on the skid. ‘You’ll need it if the grid comes down.’
‘When the grid comes down,’ I said. But I did what he told me, abandoning my march along the wall and coming over to take back Tobias.
He smiled as I picked him up and I felt my chest tighten with anxiety. Who was this kid?
How many hours had it been since Mum had fed him back at the Complex, and all this time he was just perfectly content with not being fed or changed or even properly shielded from the rain?
I sat down against the wall, knees bent, propping him up in front of me.
‘He’ll have to be killed,’ said Calvin.
My head snapped up, terror exploding like a grenade.
‘Shackleton,’ Calvin clarified, seeing the panic on my face. ‘Whatever else happens, if we succeed, Shackleton has to be taken care of.’
I let out a shaky breath.
‘And what about you?’ Amy asked, getting to her feet behind him. ‘What should we do with you when this is all over?’
‘Whatever you think best,’ said Calvin, that mournful tone colouring his voice again. ‘You’re right, of course. I am every bit as guilty as he is. But I’m not talking about justice. I’m talking about ensuring that this doesn’t happen again.’
He returned his gaze to me, like for some reason he thought I was going to be the one who’d be making that decision. ‘You can’t imprison Shackleton. He’s too well-connected on the outside. A prison sentence might as well be an acquittal for all the time it would take him to free himself. And then he’ll be back on his feet, ready to start all over again.’
‘No he won’t,’ I said. ‘I mean, even if all that’s true … Phoenix is a one-off, right? He can’t recreate the fallout.’
‘The fallout was a gift,’ said Calvin. ‘A shortcut. But Shackleton’s dream of a better world stretches back far beyond his discovery of this place. That dream will not die here. Not unless he does.’
Amy leant over the side of the cage, face hidden under her streaming hair. ‘Brilliant.’
It took a minute to even get my head around it. However impossible it had seemed that we might actually succeed, in our minds, the end of Tabitha had always been The End. It had never even entered my head that it could drag out beyond that.
But what should have plummeted me to a whole new depth of exhaustion and despair felt strangely like the best news Calvin had shared with us since we ran into him.
Because what if that was the answer to the question I’d just been asking? What if Shackleton’s discovery of Phoenix was no accident? What if he was meant to find this place – this place, out of all the other places and plans he could have come up with – not so he could exterminate humanity, but so he could fail? So that we could beat him?
What if we really could still win this thing?
Tell me that makes some kind of sense, I thought, lifting Tobias up so we were face to face. Tell me I’m not just going crazy.
Tobias gazed blankly back at me.
I mean, apart from the bit where I’m trying to communicate telepathically with a baby.
Tobias stared at me for a moment longer, nose wrinkling as a raindrop splashed into his face. Then he yawned and closed his eyes, drifting off into sleep.
THURSDAY, AUGUST 13, 10.59 A.M. 6 HOURS, 1 MINUTE
‘This is insane,’ said Chew.
‘We’ve done insaner,’ I said. Then I took another look at what we’d done to the skid unit. ‘Actually, no we haven’t.’
‘It’s kind of like the Trojan horse,’ said Wilson.
‘Right,’ said Chew, ‘because no-one’s going to suspect a thing when this rolls up to the door.’
‘You don’t want to come?’ said Lazarro. ‘Feel free to stay back here and guard the trees.’
‘Oh, I’m coming,’ said Chew. ‘I just want it on record that I think this is insane.’
‘Noted,’ said Reeve. ‘Get in.’
We piled into the cage at the back of the skid. Ten of us: the Weirs, Reeve and Katie, Hamilton, Chew, Wilson, Lazarro, Saunders, and me. All armed with rifles and utility belts.
I felt the weight of the weapon in my hands. Reeve had pulled me aside and showed me how to fire it, but even holding the thing felt wrong to me.
Could I do it? When the time came, when someone got between me and where I needed to be, could I actually pull the trigger on another life? And what did it say about me if I could?
I twisted sideways as Lazarro pressed in next to me, a black metal tube thing perched over his shoulder. It was the centrepiece of our plan: a shoulder-mounted missile launcher. Shackleton Co-operative designed, sleek and compact and hopefully just powerful enough to take down the shield grid.
‘Oi!’ said Chew, as the back of the launcher swung past. ‘Careful, mate. You could put an eye out with that.’
Lazarro rolled his eyes. ‘Don’t tempt me, Chew.’
Bodies crushed in all around
me, and I felt the skid dip under our collective weight. This was definitely not what this thing was built for.
Kirke slammed the back of the cage shut behind us. He came around the side, to where four large riot shields were leaning against the side of the skid.
‘How come we’ve never seen the Co-operative use these before?’ I asked, as Kirke started passing the shields into the cage.
‘Never had a riot,’ said Kirke. ‘Not a smart move to bring these things out until you really need them. People see a bunch of guys suited up in riot gear, they tend to rise to the occasion.’
Reeve, Chew, Wilson and Hamilton held the shields together above our heads, creating a kind of makeshift roof over the cage.
The rest of the skid was as well-protected as we could make it. We’d roped whatever bits of wood and metal we could scrounge to the sides of the cage, and mounted another riot shield to the front of the skid to protect Kirke as he drove.
The engine rumbled to life beneath my feet. We turned in a slow circle, struggling only slightly under the weight of its oversized cargo, and surged off in the direction of the road.
The rain might have eased up a bit by now, but the cold still reached all the way down to my bones. I held onto my rifle, everyone pressed in close around me, and watched the trees slide past overhead, warping out of shape through the plastic of the riot shields. I might have been crammed in here like a battery hen with all the others, but I felt more alone than I had in weeks. It felt so unnatural to be going into something like this without Jordan standing next to me. Like half of me was missing.
‘You okay, mate?’ asked Mr Weir behind me.
‘Yeah,’ I lied. ‘You?’
‘Not my best day ever,’ he said, a rough edge to his voice.
The skid dipped, emerging onto the main road. Kirke slowly brought us around, pulling to a stop just short of the south end of town. My nerves were stretched to breaking point. I pictured myself edging to the top of that first enormous hill on a roller coaster. Nothing to do but hold on and wait for the drop.
Kirke glanced back, waiting for Reeve’s okay.
‘Stay together,’ said Reeve, nodding at him. ‘We stay together and we keep each other alive in there.’
Doomsday Page 15
