Doomsday

by Chris Morphew

  ‘So how did you get out?’ I asked.

  ‘Same way we got up here without getting shot,’ said Reeve, indicating Miller and Tank. ‘These two.’

  ‘We’ve been hiding out in the building since last night,’ said Miller. ‘Keeping a low profile. I couldn’t show my face after yesterday, but your mate here’s been posing as a new recruit. And so far, with all the chaos going on, no-one’s pulled him up on it.’

  ‘Tank walked right into the loyalty room and convinced the guards to hand Katie and me over,’ said Reeve. ‘Told them Shackleton had ordered him to take us in for questioning.’

  Tank beamed.

  ‘Plan was to go back in and get the others,’ said Miller, ‘but I guess that’s out the window now that Shackleton’s seen us.’

  ‘Speaking of which,’ said Katie, ‘shouldn’t we be getting out of here?’

  The question was barely out of her mouth when the sound of footsteps came racing up the hall. Miller leapt out, rifle raised.

  ‘Whoa – hey!’ said a frantic voice outside. ‘Hey, don’t shoot!’

  Miller stood aside and Mr and Mrs Weir came barrelling into the room.

  ‘Luke!’ Mrs Weir’s mouth fell open at the sight of my cuffed wrists and bleeding hand. She rushed over and put her hands on my shoulders. ‘Oh Luke, we thought we heard something going on in here, but we had no idea it was –’

  ‘It’s fine,’ I said. ‘I’m fine.’

  Mr Weir looked around, scanning the faces in the room, then rushed to Shackleton’s desk. He pushed down on the top of it with both hands, and a section of the wood levered up like a laptop screen. I ran around the desk, crowding in with everybody else to see what he was doing.

  Mr Weir’s fingers were flying across the keyboard at the base of a monitor. ‘Controls for the automated defences,’ he explained, not looking up. ‘I’ve been tinkering on old mate Ben More’s computer for the last few hours. Couldn’t access any of this from there, but I could see the pathway I needed to …’ He trailed off, focusing.

  I stared at the screen, barely breathing, not a clue what I was looking at, but still completely transfixed.

  And even though, from what Dad had said, the military weren’t in any massive hurry to get here, I still couldn’t totally push aside the image of all of them swarming in and tipping the balance back in our favour.

  Don’t, I ordered myself. Three hours left. You’re not saving humanity with wishful thinking.

  ‘Guys,’ said Miller, over at the door, ‘I know this is important, but I really think we need to –’

  ‘Almost there …’ said Mr Weir.

  ‘Can’t save the world if we’re dead,’ said Miller.

  ‘Yeah,’ Mr Weir bristled. ‘Which part of “almost there” didn’t you –?’

  A little chime sounded from the speaker above the screen. Mr Weir stepped back from the computer, fists flying into the air in a startlingly Peter-like expression of triumph.

  ‘Only problem is he can still come in here and reactivate it. If you give me a few minutes, I might be able to lock out the interface and –’

  Miller pushed forward.

  BLAM!

  The computer screen exploded in a shower of shattered plastic.

  ‘Or that,’ said Mr Weir, as Miller lowered his pistol again. ‘That’ll work.’

  ‘Great,’ said Reeve. ‘Time to go.’

  ‘We need to get down to the bunker,’ I said. ‘Find Shackleton and –’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Miller. ‘There’s just that small matter of us being completely locked out.’

  Mr Weir raised his hand. ‘Actually …’

  Every head turned to look at him.

  ‘Like I said, I’ve been doing some digging on More’s computer. And look, obviously there are no guarantees until we get in there and try, but,’ Mr Weir’s face twisted into a kind of half-smile, the same look he’d had when he got the transceiver working, ‘I think I might have just bypassed Shackleton’s lockdown.’

  A ripple of noise ran through the group. My heart felt like it couldn’t figure out whether to float into my chest or plummet into my stomach.

  I looked around the circle. This was it. A handful of people, half of us barely able to hold a weapon the right way up, and no plan left but a blind attack on Shackle-ton’s last stronghold. But we had only a few hours, and I wasn’t about to spend them sitting around waiting to die.

  I just hoped Jordan was having better luck than we were.

  Mr Weir looked to me, like for some reason he thought the decision was mine to make. He nodded at the resolve on my face. ‘What do you say we get down there and end this thing?’

  THURSDAY, AUGUST 13, 1.42 P.M. 3 HOURS, 18 MINUTES

  I reached behind me, heart pounding in my head, drawing Calvin’s pistol and training it on his chest.

  He took a half-step back.

  ‘That’s not going to fix this, Jordan. I drop this canister and it’s over.’ He held the thing out to me, liquid oozing around inside like it had a life of its own. ‘Seven billion dead. You don’t want to have that –’

  ‘Don’t you dare!’ I shouted, moving shakily towards him. ‘You sick bastard! Don’t you dare try to put this on me!’

  ‘Jordan –’

  ‘He’s a baby!’

  ‘A baby who just happened to be brought into the world six months ahead of schedule by the very same force that turned me around and brought me here to help you? Can you honestly –?’

  ‘I’m not going to kill him!’ I screamed, and felt Tobias start writhing against me again. ‘I don’t care if –’

  ‘You’re not going to kill him,’ said Calvin. ‘The entire basis of Shackleton’s concern is your brother’s ability to survive Tabitha.’

  ‘And what it he’s wrong? What if –?’

  But my rant was cut short as Tobias let loose an earsplitting scream. He squirmed like a fish out of water, face red, mouth stretched like he was being tortured. I hesitated, glancing up at Calvin again, then stuck the pistol in my jeans and pulled Tobias from the sling.

  Tobias kept screaming, and it was like he was draining the fight out of me. I held him to my shoulder, bouncing him up and down, making the closest I could come to a soothing noise, somehow knowing none of it was going to work.

  ‘Can’t you – can’t you just destroy it?’ I said desperately. ‘Bury it underground or something?’

  ‘Don’t be an idiot,’ he barked, in a voice that sounded terrifyingly like the old Calvin. ‘Do you truly believe I need Tobias’s assistance to bury this weapon?’

  Tobias threw himself against my hands, gasping for breath, and screamed again.

  Calvin hunched over. ‘Tabitha will not be contained,’ he said. ‘It is no mere weapon. It is alive – or near enough. We brought it to life a hundred days ago when we activated the countdown. There is no turning back from that.’

  ‘But this whole place –’

  ‘This facility was set up to allow Tabitha to disperse with maximum efficiency. To minimise the window of opportunity for a retaliatory strike from the outside. But Tabitha doesn’t need this place. When the countdown expires, Tabitha will either be released from the containment capsule or it will burst out of it. It will vaporise instantly, self-replicating with exponentially increasing speed until it completes the task for which it was designed. Humanity will be extinguished in a matter of days.’

  I could barely hear him over Tobias’s shrieking in my ears, and even the bits that did get through just turned to dust inside my head. It was too much to even begin to process. An endless sea, surging and swirling in my mind’s eye, millions upon millions of nameless, faceless people destined to be tortured to death unless I stood here and fed poison to my terrified, day-old brother.

  ‘Come on, Tobias,’ I said, crying along with him now. ‘Come on, shh-shh-shh-shh. You’re okay. You’re okay.’

  But lying to a baby was about as comforting as lying to myself.

  Visions of our family
swam up out of the blur, Mum and Dad and Georgia, all trapped in the Shackleton Building, and Luke …

  Luke, on the run if he was lucky. Dead as soon as Tabitha got out.

  ‘Jordan …’ said Calvin, edging forward again.

  Tobias took a shuddering breath, face bright red from the effort, and cried out again. I held onto him, my arms trembling.

  I imagined Shackleton in his office, prowling around above it all, rubbing his hands together at his impending genocide, and the rage that had been simmering inside me boiled over again. My stomach churned with an overpowering disgust at that sick, self-righteous old man and his twisted self-made morals and his filthy lie of a town. With all the strength I had left, I hated this place and I hated him.

  But more than anything else, I hated that it was all completely out of my control. A hundred days of fighting and it came down to this. A leap into the darkness.

  No guarantees. No promises that this was going to turn out okay.

  Just faith.

  Faith that I hadn’t been through all this for nothing, that those glimpses of a bigger picture weren’t all just in my head, that somehow that picture was big enough to accommodate even this.

  Calvin stared down at me, his face white. He looked tempted to just snatch Tobias out of my hands and do the thing himself. ‘Jordan –’

  ‘Give it to me!’ I snapped, sitting down with my back against the pillar, my tears almost drowning the words out. I cradled Tobias in my lap, propped up against my knees. He twisted on his back, still wailing uncontrollably, his tiny fists balled up.

  Calvin crouched next to me, holding out the little canister again. I held Tobias’s head as steady as I could with one hand, and reached out with the other, taking hold of the tube dangling from the Tabitha canister. I could barely keep my fingers on it.

  I held tight to the tube, trying to guide it down towards Tobias’s mouth, but I couldn’t do it. My mind gave the instruction, but my body refused to co-operate. I just sat there, gazing down at him, sobbing and shaking and sucking in ragged half-breaths.

  Calvin’s hand came down around mine, cold and strong. I stiffened, but didn’t pull away. He held my hand steady, slowly guiding the canister towards Tobias’s face.

  ‘It’s okay,’ Calvin whispered, as close as I’d ever heard him to gentle. ‘It’s okay. Just a few minutes –’

  Tobias’s eyes snapped open. He gazed up at the tube. And immediately, he stopped screaming. He let out a squeaky gasp, lungs fighting for air, eyes locked onto Tabitha with the kind of focus a newborn baby should definitely not have been capable of.

  I froze up again. Calvin’s hand tensed on mine.

  He kept moving, nudging my hand gently forward.

  At the last second, I freaked out again. ‘No, wait! Wait – I don’t –’

  Too late.

  The end of the tube slipped into Tobias’s mouth. Instantly, his lips clamped down around it and he started suckling furiously.

  A cold shudder wracked my body. I cringed with disgust, expecting Tobias to spit the stuff back out, but he kept drinking like it was milk.

  I pictured Mum and Dad standing over me, watching on in horror as I poisoned their only son. Georgia crying, screaming, begging me to stop. Luke, white-faced, shaking his head, all his love for me curling up and dying.

  ‘I’m sorry …’ I murmured, reality and unreality blurring into each other. ‘I’m sorry … I’m sorry …’

  Tobias kept drinking, little gurgling and swallowing sounds escaping his throat as he sucked the canister dry.

  Calvin tightened his grip, holding me steady, but he might as well not have been there for all the notice I took. I sniffed, nose running, eyes blurring everything together. ‘I’m s-sorry … I’m sorry …’

  And still Tobias kept going, sucking ravenously, dragging the last tiny droplets down the sides of the capsule until finally – finally – all of it was gone.

  Tobias squirmed against my knees again. He yawned deeply and the tube dropped out of his mouth.

  I stopped moaning. Stopped breathing. Silence flooded the release station. Calvin slowly released his hold on me, pulling the canister out of my hand and laying it on the ground.

  Tobias opened his eyes. He gazed up at me, face breaking into a smile, and I felt the air flood back into my lungs.

  He was okay.

  He was alive, and that meant –

  I glanced at Calvin for confirmation, not daring to believe that it could really have worked, that all of this could really be over. He hovered over me, half-dazed, a smile pulling just slightly at the corners of his open mouth, and relief washed over me like nothing I’d ever felt in my life.

  It was over.

  We had done it.

  I looked at Tobias again and burst out laughing, overwhelmed with a dizzying rush of elation. I got to my feet, hugging my brother to me, tears still pouring down my face.

  And then Tobias began to shake.

  At first, I thought it was just my own jittering. But then Tobias took a deep, heaving breath and started screaming like he was on fire.

  ‘No …’ I breathed, holding him out in front of me, staggering as the weight came slamming back down onto my shoulders again. ‘No, no, no, no …’

  Tobias convulsed in my hands, his eyes wide open and rolling to the back of his head. He screamed again, weaker this time, like his throat was closing over.

  ‘No, no, no …’ My voice dissolved into wordless groaning, and I swayed, almost dropping him. Calvin’s hands came down around me, cradling me and the baby, keeping us upright.

  Tobias kept trembling and writhing like there was something alive inside him, but I could already feel him growing weaker, see his face turning from red to blue. He let a pitiful cry and tried to fill his lungs again. He couldn’t do it. His eyes squeezed shut with the effort, lids closing over vacant white globes.

  The visions of my family returned, wailing and screaming, reaching out to tear the baby away from me, but it was too late. Already far too late. A few more desperate, shallow gulps and his breathing gave out altogether, the shaking slowed to a stop and he fell silent, collapsing heavily into me.

  I let out a cry of my own, harsh and guttural and spewing up from the depths of me. I searched him frantically for a pulse, a heartbeat, anything. But there was nothing there. Nothing but clammy, lifeless flesh.

  Just a tiny body.

  Adrenaline exploded inside me and I tore out of Calvin’s grip, stumbling back from him. ‘WHAT HAPPENED?’

  Calvin didn’t even lift his head to look at me. His eyes hovered over the lifeless form of my brother hanging limp in my arms, and a disbelieving gasp escaped his lips. ‘It didn’t work.’

  THURSDAY, AUGUST 13, 1.49 P.M. 3 HOURS, 11 MINUTES

  ‘IT DIDN’T WORK?’ I stormed forward, Tobias’s body sinking into my chest. So still. So heavy.

  Calvin backed away from me. ‘Jordan, I – We knew it was a possibility. With the disappearance of the fallout, we knew there was a chance this might –’

  ‘NO! You said it would work! You said we were meant –’ I ducked Calvin as he reached out in a deluded attempt to calm me down. ‘Get away from me!’

  His eyes were red, face stretched with pain. ‘Jordan –’ ‘Shut up!’ I snapped, fumbling behind me for the pistol. ‘Shut up. Don’t even –’

  ‘We need to get back into town,’ said Calvin cautiously, realising I might actually be unbalanced enough to pull the trigger this time. ‘If the disappearance of the fallout has compromised our resistance to Tabitha, our only remaining hope of survival is to return to Phoenix and find Shackleton. He may know some other way to withstand –’

  ‘You think you deserve to survive this?’ I spat, my weapon trembling in my hand. ‘The whole human race is about to be wiped out, and you think you –?’

  ‘I am not concerned about me!’ said Calvin. ‘I am trying to save your life! You have a family back there who –’

  ‘I JUST KILLED MY BROTHE
R!’

  The words rang in my ears, and a suffocating dread swept over me, blotting out all the light in the room. The pistol slipped out of my grip, clattering noisily to the floor, and I clapped a hand to my mouth, overcome by the crushing horror of what I’d just done, like it had taken saying the words out loud for it to become real.

  I stared down at Tobias’s unmoving body, cradled in my other arm like he was still a person and not just an empty shell, and I was torn between wanting to hug him to me and wanting to throw his body to the ground. I don’t remember consciously making the decision, but the next thing I knew, I’d lowered him back into the sling on my shoulder.

  Calvin reached out to me again. ‘You were doing what you thought –’

  ‘It doesn’t matter! It doesn’t matter what I thought! He’s dead!’

  My brain fired with images of myself trudging up the steps to the Shackleton Building, delivering my baby brother’s dead body back into the hands of my parents. I saw the looks on their faces, looks that refused to go away no matter how much I tried to explain myself. Because there was no explanation. No way in the world to justify what I’d done.

  It didn’t matter what happened after this. It was already over.

  ‘You should –’ Calvin began, then closed his eyes for a moment. ‘We should leave Tobias here. When Tabitha – When the countdown expires, we want to be as far away from him as possible.’

  ‘Who cares?’ I said. ‘Who cares what happens to us? In three hours, the whole world is dead! What difference could it possibly –?’

  I cut myself short, seized by a sudden suspicion, and ducked to the ground, scrambling to retrieve the pistol.

  I sprung up again, thrusting the weapon back on Calvin’s chest. ‘You knew!’

  Calvin’s hands flew out in front of him. ‘No –’

  ‘You wanted this to happen!’ I spat, my guilt shifting into a hot fury that coursed through every part of me. ‘You didn’t bring Tobias out here for us! You brought him out here for you! For Shackleton! You needed Tobias to – to what? Incubate Tabitha? To activate it?’

  ‘No!’ said Calvin. ‘Jordan, that isn’t – How could Shackleton have built his whole plan around a child he didn’t even know the fallout was capable of creating?’