“He took me to the cleaners last night,” my driver is saying. “Totally skinned me.”
I do not respond. On the track ahead of us, puddles glisten.
“You want in?” the driver asks me.
I glance at him, wishing he’d just shut up so I can think. The driver hates the puddles, swears at them a lot as he tries to weave slowly around them.
“C’mon,” he says, in between a bout of swearing, “you want in on the game? I could get you in.”
A random star in my brain twinkles feebly in the gloom: My enemy’s enemy is my friend. (That’s what my history teacher said when she was trying to explain some of the jaw-droppingly “as if!” pacts that got made in World War Two.) My enemy’s enemy is my friend.
“High stakes, though,” the driver is saying. “You need serious—and I do mean serious—stuff to put on the table. You got that?”
I nod. I am just looking out of the windshield, desperately trying—trying to think.
“I’m not talking cash, mind. It’s gotta be jewelry—good stuff—maybe a nice piece of art. None of that modern nonsense—”
He swears, then shuts up for a moment as he maneuvers slowly around some more puddles. My enemy’s enemy. I take a deep plasticky-rubbery breath and then remove my helmet. I am almost certainly going to need to shout, and it will only get in the way.
“Proper paintings, that’s what people like,” he says, and glances at me—does a shocked double take when he sees that I am just a kid. “I’m a Turner man, myself…” he says, but I can see his brain has moved on to a different subject: me.
No going back now.
I fling open the door and jump out.
“!” he shouts, braking. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?!”
What I am doing is scooping up a double handful of puddle water, and I am back at the door in a flash.
“Get out!” I tell him, my gloved hands dripping.
Shaking, they’re also shaking, and my voice has found its natural frightened squeak.
He stares at my hands in horror for 0.1 micrometers of a nanosecond—then he’s out of the ambulance.
What’s supposed to happen next is I get in and drive off.
What actually happens is the soldier gets out before I can do that, gun waving between me and the driver because he can’t work out what the problem is, only that there is one.
“She tried to kill me!” shrieks the driver.
“No, I didn’t!” I snap at him. “I was just threatening to try to kill you!”
“Put your hands in the air and back up!” barks the soldier at us; his breath, like all of ours, pants out white, hot with human fear in the cold night air.
“But she—” the driver protests.
“Both of you!”
Wondering if I’ve got the guts to start throwing water around (H20 versus bullets…hmm…) I look down at my cupped hands, but most of what was there has dribbled away. The gun herds us together as we back up—carefully, to avoid the puddle!—raising our hands. From mine, water drips down.
“See!” shrieks the driver.
“I was just trying to scare him, that’s all,” I shout at the soldier. “I was just trying to scare him!”
I am now scaring both of them. My hands are gloved, but my head is bare. Puddle water drips trickle down my face. I blink them out of my eyes—and spit when a drop reaches my mouth. I am not sure what is scaring me more right now: the gun, the overall situation—or the water itself.
Anyone who has seen what the rain can do would understand this; even for a freak like me, the fear makes my skin crawl and twitch.
“What the …” breathes the soldier.
“There’s a cure!” I squeal. Ha! I have been out of that base for five minutes, and already I have blabbed—but this hardly counts, does it? This is emergency blabbing.
The soldier shakes his head, reaches for his radio.
“There is! There is! They’ve got a massive tankful of phage!”
A frown flits across the soldier’s face.
“The cure! It’s a…rockety thing! From my nose! It’s—ask him!” I dare to point at the sorry figure of Beardy, who is clambering drunkenly out of the ambulance.
“Are we there yet?” he says and staggers, clinging on to the soldier to stay upright—and in that moment, when the soldier is distracted by Beardy, I scoop up another handful of puddle-water. Can’t risk it draining away, so… OH. I slurp it up.
“Hey!” shrieks the driver as I run at the soldier.
Pretty nasty situation this. I am in a face-off with an armed man, and all I have is—
“She’s got a mouthful of water!” the driver helpfully shouts.
I do mean that: “helpfully.” I give it a quick slosh around my mouth to make sure the soldier gets it, but this negotiation is going to be tricky now that I can’t speak. (Do I expect to die at any second because I’ve got a mouthful of rainwater? YES, I still do.)
Me and the soldier eyeball each other.
“Well, that’s not going to hurt anyone, is it?” slurs Beardy.
Me and the soldier do a “You what?” eye flick at him; then it’s back to stare-you-down. In my head I am doing an emergency read-through of my mental notes for the Ruby Morris Guide to the Rockety Thing, but—annoyingly—they fail to mention whether this is true.
“I said, it’s not going to hurt anyone, is it?”
I give the water in my mouth a threatening slosh. The soldier flinches; the driver is gasping.
“I swear,” Beardy slurs. “I so totally promise you…”
“Is there really a cure?” pants the driver. “Is there?”
“Yeeeesss!” goes Beardy. Uh, he sounds like a great-big grown-up version of my stepbrother, Dan.
The soldier brings his gun up under my chin.
“Spit it at him,” he tells me.
I turn my head to the professor.
“Ooo! So scared!” says Beardy. (Dan!)
“Not him!” yells the soldier. “Him.” He jerks his head at the driver.
“ hell, mate!” pants the driver.
“Your choice,” the soldier says to me. “Bullet or spit.”
“Bored now,” sings Beardy. (Dan!)
“You run, you’ll get a bullet anyway,” the soldier tells the driver.
“Go ahead,” Beardy tells me. “Spit! Only could you please hurry up?” He waves a drunken finger at the clouding sky. It is possible, I suppose, that he isn’t quite as drunk as he looks—but then he staggers a bit, and I think maybe he is.
“Do it,” the soldier tells me.
I turn my head to face the driver—who stands before me…panting, weeping, and unsure who to look at with pleading eyes: me or the soldier.
I am going to do it. I am, because I don’t see—I cannot see—what else there is to do…but my eyes slide to the right as a small child climbs, shivering, out of the ambulance. The Princess tugs at the soldier’s sleeve. He looks down at her, and I see it; I see him do that tiny, melty, guilty, flinchy thing that most decent adults do when small, scared eyes have spotted their badness.
TWOOH!
“Oh my ! Oh my ! Oh my !” wails the driver, collapsing into floods of tears the second I spit the water out onto the ground.
“They’ll kill her,” I tell the soldier. “If you turn us in, they’ll kill her. That’s what they’ve been doing: experimenting on kids. They KILL KIDS.”
“That true as well, is it?” the soldier asks Beardy.
“I’m a lab man,” Beardy mutters, suddenly sounding very sober.
“It’s true and you know it!” I shriek.
“IS—IT—TRUE?”
“Yes,” says Beardy.
For a moment, everyone just stands there, breathing white puffs of hot fear. The driver is sobbi
ng.
“Great,” says Beardy. “So now we’ve all established that, can we please discuss this someplace else?”
Everyone looks at him.
“Someplace inside?” he says, pointing at the sky.
Nimbostratus: now half the stars tucked away. The moon glares down at us.
The soldier nods.
The Princess gets back inside the back of the ambulance, but no one else wants to join her—which is fine by me; the way everyone’s so jittery, it’s probably best if we all keep an eye on each other. We pile into the front.
“Shift over,” I tell the soldier, who has taken the driver’s seat. And he does; he actually does. He sort of looks fairly composed, but there must be so much going on in his head, he’s as useless as the bawling driver—or Beardy, who would probably manage to turn the ambulance over in about 0.1 micrometers of a nanosecond (assuming he can even drive).
I bump down the track. I don’t care about puddles. When I get to the end of it, to a tarmac road, I hesitate.
“Go right,” weeps the driver.
“Go left,” says the soldier.
Beardy shrugs. He has no clue.
“Go right,” blubs the driver.
I angle the steering wheel to turn right.
“I’ve got kids,” the soldier says. “I’ve got kids.”
His radio crackles.
“I’ve got a daughter. Her age,” he says. “Turn left.”
“Hey! Wassup!” a radio voice says.
“Road’s bad,” he speaks into it. “We’re coming around the long way.”
He clicks that radio off. “We need to think this thing through,” he says.
I go left.
“Ah, come on! No!” wails the driver. “For Pete’s sake! I just wanna go home!”
“Oh, shuddup,” I snarl at him.
The four of us stare out of the windshield—stare hard at the road ahead, like we’re going to see the future appear out of the dark.
At least, that’s what I was doing—from the way their hands clutched the dashboard, I think the others may have been more concerned about the road itself.
Right on cue…it starts raining. Awesome.
I seriously step on it.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
I saw there was a garage ahead of us—a fancy car showroom. I spotted smashed glass, and because the place had already been well and truly busted into, I drove straight on in, with only a small amount of further smashing as the roof of the ambulance collided with the remaining bits of window. I screeched to a halt at the end of a long line of fancy cars whose prices looked like the answers to math questions I’d rather not be asked.
The prof, the soldier, and the driver bundled out immediately and plonked themselves down in the funny little potted plants and seating area they had—so you could make-believe you were at home on the sofa, chatting about which car to buy (or what to do about the apocalypse, in this case). The discussion pretty much reminded me of radio programs my mom and my stepdad would have on: people going on and on about stuff. Angrily. It got even angrier when Beardy claimed that the people in charge wanted to use the cure as some kind of international bargaining thing (“More like a card game!”)—though quite what trinkets they might want in exchange was not known to him (most probably nuclear missiles, a few countries, oil reserves, that kind of thing).
To be honest, I wasn’t really listening that closely. Every time it felt like my brain was tuning into a thought, I’d just tweak it back to the matter at hand: gotta get out of here, Ruby.
The Princess, whose sign did not show her name but said “Nil by Mouth,” watched from the side door of the ambulance as, in near darkness, I worked my way through every car in there; each one, same thing: battery dead—and no jumper cables to be found. Useless.
I splopped plastickly-rubberily past the discussion panel, ignored: ghost girl in a biosuit. There was a dinky coffee machine and a store of creamers, so I grabbed the lot of them, went back to the ambulance, and—ah! Saw the machine they use to start stopped hearts with. I dumped the creamers and inspected it. It’s basically a giant battery pack, isn’t it?
I had a go with it on a car.
It didn’t work.
Mighty cross about that.
I took it back to the ambulance (lights still on inside) to get a better look at the instructions—like maybe it was possible to turn the thing up?—when the Princess tapped me on the arm.
“Yeah, yeah, just give me a sec,” I said.
It’s all probably sounding a little weird to you, the whole situation and the not even speaking to the kid—it sounds a little weird to me—but I tell you, I was so trying to keep my brain tuned in on what I needed to do. Anything else at all could not be handled.
I didn’t get the instructions, but I thought it was worth another go anyway. The Princess tried to pull me back—
“Yeah—one sec!” I jumped out of the vehicle and—she slammed the door shut behind me. “What the—”
Headlights from the road rippled along the line of cars. I hadn’t even heard the engine. I ducked—way too late.
Prof Beardy, the soldier, and the driver—they’d ducked too.
I peeked—saw the taillights of a big, dark army truck disappearing.
“We need to get out of here,” the driver—who’d stopped blubbering but was still freaking out—said.
Yeah, I thought. Need to get out of here. I ditched the heart-starter, and as I speed-crawled/splopped plastickly-rubberily for the ambulance, I had a genius moment. Hanging on the wall by the “Let’s pretend we’re at home on the sofa choosing our car” area was a huge road map of Britain, so you could see all the places you could go once you’d bought your fancy car.
I dragged over a spare chair and tried to pull the thing off the wall. It wouldn’t budge. There was some random mini-tree in a pot, a thing that had probably once looked totally plastic and now looked totally dead. So I grabbed it by the trunk and swung the whole thing at the glass. Big smash. Big mess. I tore the map out. Unfortunately, it was stuck down at the edges, so there were quite a lot of places we wouldn’t be going to.
I turned around and…there they all were, staring at me: the prof, the soldier, the driver.
“I just want to go home,” I told them, trying to scrumple the map into a more manageable size. “Please just let me go.”
I felt my frightened heartbeat.
“I’ll keep my mouth shut. I won’t tell a soul. I promise you! I just want to go home. Please. Please! Just let me go.”
“I could take you,” said the driver, getting to his feet.
“Siddown,” said the soldier. He sat.
“I’m just a kid,” I told them.
I am so not. I was. Once. That’s gone.
“I don’t know how I got like this! I promise you I don’t!”
“Clinically speaking, she is no longer relevant,” said Beardy.
Another set of headlights—army truck—blasted us.
I stood and I pointed at the gleaming ambulance. The elephant in the fancy car showroom. “They’ll see that,” I said. “Next truck that comes past, they’ll see it.”
The soldier, who was the only one I really needed to pay attention to (gun), nodded.
“Get out of here, kid,” he said. “Take the back roads.”
The problem with maps, even complete ones, is you need to know where you are in the first place. I didn’t know where we were. All I knew was that I needed to avoid the main roads. That thought came through the hiss in my head loud and clear.
We drove around for ages burning precious fuel and—it turns out, getting nowhere. We hit a main road. I have this horrible feeling that it looks vaguely familiar…but we’re going to have to go for it. I kill my headlights and turn out onto the road.
We’re in a forest,
right, surrounded by trees and I am peering at the road in the darkness and… Ru? Wasn’t there a forest on the way to the army place? a tuned-in voice in my head kicks up.
“Yeah!” I say out loud.
Thought so. You’re going the wrong way.
OK. OH-KAY. I need to turn around, is all… Oh, but headlights are coming toward me, blasting through the trees.
GET OFF THE ROAD! shrieks my head voice.
Parking place on left: I swing into it—the kind of place you’d have parked to go for a charming country ramble—but not good enough, not far enough from the road—but there’s a track, leading into the woods. We are…GOING DOWN IT.
I accelerate into it, and immediately we’re hitting stuff, bouncing left and right and bumping along, through darkness and bracken and brambles and bushes—some brambles so high they smack against the windshield, smear ink-dark blackberry-blood spatters across the glass.
Bash-splat-splat-bash-splat, go the brambles as we bump, bash, bump, lurch, slide, smash down that track—and in the middle of it all the ambulance conks out. I try to restart it without stopping. One hand on the wheel, one hand messing with the ignition key, both feet messing with the pedals. Won’t restart. All gas gone. Engine noise gone—all you can hear is the bump, bash, bump, lurch, slide, smash (and the bump, bash, bump, lurch, slide, smash of my heart) as we freewheel down the track.
Until we stop. I flick on the headlights for ONE SECOND, for long enough to check. We have gone far enough, I think. I hope. We’re deep in the forest. It’s night. It’s raining—the Princess hammers on the glass between us. I get it. I kill the lights. We sit. In silence. Hoping.
I am holding so many thoughts away from me. So many thoughts. The effort of it hurts. I sit, holding back the thoughts and the feelings that latch on to them, screaming. My eyes do that adjusting thing, the way they do in darkness. After a while, I can see it all: the trees, the ferns, the brambles…
After a longer while, the rain stops. I see a fox creep across the path.
It got wet; it shakes itself. It comes sniffing up so close to the ambulance I can’t see it anymore.
Storm Page 13
