Truly Deadly: The Complete Series: (YA Spy Thriller Books 1-5)

by Rob Aspinall

  I crashed through and fell to the Hive floor, rolling off the impact, a shower of glass cascading all around me.

  As I rolled, the floor lit up in disco squares to the sound of a drumroll. Probably a giant neon sign that things were about to go majorly tits. Yet, I didn’t think anything of it at the time.

  “Move it, Dancing Queen,” I said, pushing a boogying Philippe behind a pair of large metal vending machines, Twinkies and chocolate bars squirming violently in their packets.

  Okay, second bad sign.

  Security massed by the elevator doors. There was no way out that wasn’t impossible, but I felt surprisingly chilled. A little spaced out.

  I’d had so much medication over the years, I’d once been told my resistance to drugs was abnormally high. But it was finally time for my half-dose of hallucinogens to kick in. I tried to shake it off. Philippe, meanwhile, was singing the “Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes” song, tapping on different body parts in childish delight.

  “What the fuck?” I shouted.

  “Join in!” he said, oblivious to the bullets thunking into the vending machines. He began singing again, tapping the wrong body parts at the wrong times. An uncoordinated mess.

  I slapped him across the face. “Focus your fucking mind, Vasquez!”

  I drew his weapon from his hip, tucked away under his suit jacket, and thrust it in his hands. “You remember how to shoot?”

  “We shouldn’t kill people, Lorna. It’s bad karma.”

  “Who said anything about killing?” I said, thinking fast. “We’re playing a computer game. Call of Duty …”

  He shook his head.

  “Halo? Assassin’s Creed? God, how ancient are you?”

  I tried to think of a really old game. “Okay, Space Invaders,” I said.

  Philippe laughed and made pew-pew noises like a laser gun.

  “That’s right,” I said. “The alien ships are over by the stairs and elevators. Use the gun to shoot them down, but stay out of the way of their laser beams. And, whatever you do, don’t shoot at me, okay?”

  “I am Earth’s defender!” he bellowed, eyes on fire and skin pixelating.

  Third bad sign.

  I gave him the hand signals he’d taught me in training.

  He nodded and we moved.

  Then reality broke. I shitting well broke reality.

  Despite his fragile state of mind, Philippe took out three guys in two seconds with shots to the head. I moved across the Hive floor to a position beneath the Command and Control pod, shoes scrunching over shattered glass.

  While Philippe was playing space invaders, I was looking down my barrel at a small army of clowns, unicorns and white rabbits. All armed to the teeth. Music started playing inside my head. “Disco Inferno”. (Spotify it if you don’t know it.) I was gliding too. Roller boots. Pink hot pants with tiny Arina Diamond sequins. I had it all going on.

  Bullets ripped from gun barrels that opened into blooming flowers and Gummy Bears.

  I kept it together enough to fire and move, fire and move. Philippe seemed to be going on instinct, doing real damage, liquid rainbows bleeding and spraying out of the clowns/rabbits/unicorns he hit.

  A white rabbit dressed in fatigues fired at me from the Command and Control pod above. He missed, but I didn’t. He took a swan dive to the floor in front of me and burst into butterflies.

  Someone tossed a grenade my way. I caught it mid-air and rolled it back across the Hive floor towards the security forces in front of the elevators. It blew them into candy pieces, with 10,000 POINTS flashing in the air to a fruit-machine jackpot sound.

  I spun on my roller boots and skated along to the music, taking out the rest of the guys on the pod staircase with another round of Gummy Bears.

  I reconnected with Philippe, who’d strapped on his own pair of rollers. We linked arms and spun in a circle in the middle of the floor, firing off victory shots.

  Or, alternatively, we may have been moving back-to-back, holding off the remaining guards as we made our way out of there. It was like there were two realities colliding together and I was living both.

  As we fought our way to the stairwell, a trail of rainbow pools and candy mounds in our wake, the music dropped off, the roller boots became shoes and the hot pants a pair of navy suit trousers. I was running rather than skating and Philippe seemed to have acquired more weapons. We were halfway down the first flight when the rabbits blew the staircase door. It filled the place with dry ice and disco lights.

  We were penned in. The animals were coming for us.

  With his LSD shot timing out, Philippe took over command. He leaned forward on one knee against the stair railings and returned fire.

  “Go!” he shouted, his skin dropping off his face like melted cheese. “Go now!”

  He tossed me a pistol with a fresh clip and carried on firing. I smiled and hugged him from behind.

  He shook me off.

  “Snap out of it,” he said. As if he hadn’t just been acting like nutball of the century.

  I climbed up on the banister, cartoon firebugs zipping by and burrowing their way into the stairwell walls. I went to step off the banister, down the hundred-storey gap in between the stairs. Philippe seized me by the waist with a spare hand.

  “What are you doing?” he yelled.

  “Getting a closer look at the ground,” I said.

  “Then use the stairs,” he said. “I’ll cover you.”

  I did as he told me and made my way down, Philippe backing and firing behind me. Things got a little confused and time danced away from me, like when you’re in and out of sleep. I ended up in an elevator with no idea how I’d got there. It pinged open on one of the lower floors.

  Where was Philippe?

  Everything was flashing red. A voice inside my head spoke to me. Or it could have been over the PA system.

  WARNING: ALL PERSONNEL.

  CODE ONE EVACUATION PROTOCOL.

  TWENTY-TWO MINUTES TO CRITICAL MASS.

  Maybe I should get back in the elevator. Or maybe I should see what’s down this corridor, where those muted screams and bangs are coming from. They may be wounded birds … OMG, wounded birds. I gotta help!

  I brushed up against the rock wall of the corridor. It felt like velvet. I stopped and rolled my whole face over it. Daisies sprouted out all around me, accompanied by the scent of freshly cut grass. I lay there looking at the clear blue summer sky, everything glowing. The sun glowing, the treetops glowing, the barrel of a gun glowing.

  But it was getting too close, too close. I was disappearing into it like it was a tunnel. Pitch black and metal and smelling like gunpowder.

  “Hello?” I said, feeling a knot tightening in my gut. “Can anybody hear me?”

  “Yes, we can hear you, Lorna,” said a deep, god-like voice bouncing around in the metallic dark.

  “Where are you?” I shouted, arms feeling the space around me.

  “Follow my voice,” the Tunnel God said.

  I followed his voice into the light at the end. I snapped out into the corridor, a gun in my face. Nathan and a pair of anxious junior soldiers had me boxed in, tight up against the wall.

  “Sir,” one of the soldiers said, “I really think we should go.”

  “Evacuation Protocol One,” said the other.

  “Fine,” Nathan said with a dramatic sigh. “You two go and wash the piss out of your knickers. This won’t take long.”

  A pair of satanic red horns burned their way out through the top of his head. The devil had come to collect.

  33

  Cat & Mouse

  What the frig was in those injections? Whatever it was, the good trip was definitely gone. I tried to focus. Nathan took the gun out of my face. He punched me hard in the stomach, knocking the wind clean out of me. He pushed me down to my knees. Held the gun to my head.

  “You think you can come at us? You think you can stop an organisation like ours?” he said, each and every word speech-bubbling out of
his mouth like in a comic book. “We’ve been doing this for years, love. We’re professionals.”

  His words were getting to me. I knew what he was doing. He wanted me to die empty, not euphoric on the drugs. I felt small. I felt like curling up in a ball and giving up. I hung my head, the floor spinning.

  “You’re just a little girl,” he said. “A little girl with a big ugly scar. You’re all alone in a big, scary universe. No family. No friends. No boyfriend. No girlfriend. No chance. And no hope.”

  I heard the gun click ready.

  “No one hits me with a fucking Guitar Hero controller,” he said, the horns on his head growing and curling inwards. “What? No witty comeback?” he asked. “Nothing to say before I put you out of my misery?”

  My head was a mass of ugly, squirming, confused thoughts. But, out of the mess, a memory. KFC in London. Becki licking deep-fried grease off her fingers. Smiling. Her lips moving without sound. Saying something. Laughing. Licking some more.

  “Actually, I have one question,” I said to Nathan, raising my head to look him square in the eye. “Which would you rather eat? Chocolate-flavoured poo? Or poo-flavoured chocolate?”

  Nathan cocked his head. Devil horns gone. Totally stumped. “What?”

  Thank you, Becki, you fucking genius! It was all the distraction I needed.

  I knocked Nathan’s trigger hand to one side. He squeezed a fraction too late and the bullet missed by a few inches. I rose and hit him straight in the googlies with my forearm. I shoved him away and made it round the corner, another bullet taking a chunk out of the wall just behind me.

  I barged through a set of double doors and hung a right into a giant room full of pipes. Heating. Air conditioning. Whatever. It all buzzed and hummed. I hid the best I could around the back of a cluster of pipes and tried to dampen my breathing.

  I felt a lightning-bolt twinge from my left shoulder, right down to my fingertips. I heard Nathan enter the room. He was singing his own version of the “Run Rabbit” song, but his voice was slow, deep and distorted, like a demon’s.

  I caught a glimpse of him through the pipework. Holy shitballs, he was a cat. A big, blue grinning cartoon cat. I caught my own reflection in the shiny aluminium. I was a mouse. A little brown cartoon mouse, big eyes blinking and nose twitching.

  Nathan the Cat stopped only a few feet from me. “Come out, come out, wherever you are,” he said.

  I let out a squeak by accident. He turned the gun on me. Shot a hole in the pipe. Red-hot steam burst out where my head had been. I’d already bolted to my next hiding place. I felt sick and my chest hurt. I mean, really, really hurt. My heart was bumping along like a runaway train. I snuck an eyeball around a large metal boiler unit I’d taken refuge behind. What I saw were a pair of cartoon cat feet prowling the floor. I rubbed my eyes. The cat’s feet turned into a pair of cheap, plasticky trainers. Here he came.

  “I seeeeeeee yoooouuu,” Nathan said, in his demon voice.

  Suddenly, he leapt around the corner and fired a bullet into the boiler unit where I’d left my shoes; one of them sticking out just enough to tempt him in. I rushed out from behind a water cylinder with a battle cry, a monkey wrench I’d found held up in the air, ready to strike.

  Nathan spun just in time to see the heavy steel wrench in my hand – surprise all over his face. I smacked him hard in the forehead. He fell back unconscious, hitting the floor with an almighty bump. He was no longer a cat. I, no longer a mouse. Just a girl standing over a man with a blood-soaked murder weapon.

  “That was for Auntie Claire,” I said.

  I knelt down over his barely alive body. His eyes, rolling cue balls.

  “And this is for me,” I said, lifting up the wrench one more time.

  Suddenly, I felt the agony of all agonies surging through my chest and down my arm. I dropped the wrench and everything went black.

  SEVENTEEN MINUTES TO CRITICAL MASS.

  34

  Abandon All Hope

  Darkness and silence. An explosion of light. Darkness and silence. An explosion of light and pain. And awake. Bolt upright. Gasping. Panting. Shivering. Philippe standing over me with defibrillator pads in hands.

  ELEVEN MINUTES TO CRITICAL MASS.

  “What happened?” I asked, still catching my breath. Confused to fuck.

  “You wandered off,” Philippe said. “That’s what happened.”

  “Huh?” I tried to get up off the medical bench.

  “I found you in a boiler room, face down next to Nathan. Your heart had stopped.”

  “Jesus! How long?”

  “Who cares?” Philippe said. “You’re alive and no more brain-dead than usual.”

  He helped me off the bench. He’d lost the suit jacket, and his white shirt was dirty from gun and grenade smoke, a sticky red hole in the upper sleeve of his right arm.

  “You’ve been hit,” I said.

  “Flesh wound.”

  “There’s blood all down your neck,” I said.

  “I’ll live.”

  I stood up and breathed hard.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’m okay.”

  I had to be okay. Eleven minutes to critical mass. I didn’t know exactly what the mass was, but it sounded like you didn’t want to be around when it finally went critical.

  “Here,” Philippe said, giving me some kind of shot in the arm. “Adrenaline. You’ll need it.”

  Within seconds, I felt the blood rushing back into every vessel of my body. It was like downing the world’s most powerful energy drink. I grabbed a small towel off a shelf and wiped the sweat off my face and forehead. Medical Bay B was printed on the wall by the door.

  “What did you do up there?” he asked. “In the Hive.”

  “You mean the Spider’s Web? Oh, just a spot of sabotage,” I said, buttoning up my blouse with still-shaky fingers.

  “Don’t suppose you—”

  I produced the flash drive from inside my blouse pocket. Philippe didn’t exactly wear his heart on his sleeve. More like up his bum-crack under a couple of layers of underpants. Still, he seemed as impressed as he was surprised.

  “All their dirty little secrets,” I said. “Probably a few of yours too.”

  “Give me that,” he said, reaching out for the key.

  “Nope,” I said, slipping it back in my pocket.

  He handed me a JPAC-issue rifle as we headed out of the med-bay and down a corridor marked Zone 5. I don’t know whether it was the near-death experience, but I was feeling good, in spite of the Siri countdown. The Spider’s Web was kaput, Nathan was dead, JPAC were bugging out and we were escaping with files full of top-secret info, with a whole, ooh …

  TEN MINUTES TO CRITICAL MASS.

  Mission almost accomplished.

  Almost.

  I heard a bone-chilling shrieking noise. Another. Faint, but louder each time. It sounded human, but only just. And there was more than one voice.

  The red evacuation light flashed overhead. I gripped my weapon tighter as we ran.

  We had to find those elevators.

  “I’m sure they were back here,” Philippe said.

  “Don’t you remember?”

  “I was running around with a dead girl in my arms. Excuse me for not paying attention. I think they might be down here,” he said.

  “Why don’t we take the stairs?” I asked.

  “Too far down. No time.”

  Now the noises where coming from behind, too. Getting closer.

  We came to a long corridor with a set of steel doors locked shut at the end. The elevators were just before the doors. Four of them. Two either side of the corridor. We jabbed frantically on all the elevator buttons. Two were high, high up and two were down at basement level. The numbers weren’t budging.

  “Come on, come on,” I said, hopping around like I was in a queue for the ladies.

  Philippe jabbed again at the buttons.

  The shrieks were getting louder still. The pair of us stopped and listened.
<
br />   “What is that?” I asked.

  “I’d rather not find out,” Philippe said.

  The steel doors at the end of the corridor both had a small porthole window. The noise was close, real close behind those doors. I found myself drawn to them out of morbid curiosity.

  I put my face really close to the glass. The corridor beyond was empty of people, but the floor was covered in smeared lines of blood. Fresh and wet where bodies had been dragged.

  I peered in further. Bang! A face appeared suddenly on the other side of the glass. I jumped back in shock. It was a soldier, his eyes bloodshot and his lips bitten off, spit foaming out over his chin. He stared right at me and let out the scream from hell. He banged his head over and over against the glass.

  At last, we had movement on one of the elevators, coming down from level ninety. The crazy person kept head-butting the door window, over and over and over, splitting his own forehead open. I took another step back and raised my rifle. The same kind of screams came from behind us again. Much closer now. Seconds away. Four, five, six, seven of them. Maybe more.

  Philippe fixed his rifle on the empty corridor. Through the window of the adjoining door, I saw a gang of angry, mutilated monster people lurching over to join the head-banging man.

  “I thought the LSD shots had worn off,” I said.

  “We’re not hallucinating anymore,” said Philippe.

  This is not a trip. Repeat: this is not a trip.

  “I guess now we know what Belinsky was cooking up,” I said.

  “Yep,” said Philippe, eyes narrowing over the rifle sight.

  Here they came. A screaming, running horde of crap knows what.

  “Zombies?” I said. “Really?”

  “Aim for the heads,” Philippe said. “Double-tap.”

  Double-tap it was. They were fast fuckers, but Philippe put two down as soon as they rounded the corner. I got another one straight in the chin. It blew the jaw off but didn’t put it down. I got another in the right eyeball and it was gone, eaten up by the scrambling stampede of at least ten other infecteds.