Mark’s hands had bunched into fists at his side, and his normally weak chin had gone firm. “They’ll be here!”
Someone banged on the roof hatch, making them all jump.
“There!” said Mark. “See?”
Mark ran over to the hatch. Muffled voices were calling from beneath. There was a heavy metal box full of flight equipment lying on top of it, which they’d taken from the chopper to stop anything coming up from below. Mark heaved at it, and Johnny joined him.
“Careful!” said Erika. “What if they’re —”
But they’d already shoved the box aside, and pulled up the hatch.
Mark’s face fell as he looked inside. Erika felt a cold dread touch her.
Infected? Please, no. Not when we’re so close.
And then two kids scrambled up through the hatch and onto the roof. One skinny, one fat. They looked around excitedly, then both exclaimed, “Yeah!” and they fist-bumped.
Freckles and Pudge.
“How … er … how did you … ?” Mark was saying. He was fighting to conceal his disappointment.
Freckles shrugged. “Hid in a cupboard till they were gone. Sneaked out under cover of the smoke while they were all going crazy afterward.”
“Just like Metal Gear Solid!” beamed Pudge, his chubby cheeks swallowing his eyes.
Carson was leaning against the side of the chopper. He gave Erika a look, as if to say, Well?
“They’ll be here,” she said.
Carson sighed and looked away.
The door. The door with the blue light.
Caitlyn was finding it hard to think anymore. She loped along the pitch-black corridors of the basement, but they were not pitch-black to her. Her Infected eye glowed blue, and that provided light enough for her amplified senses. Through the blue darkness she went, searching.
She passed other Infected. She didn’t fear them. They didn’t acknowledge her.
The whispers in her subconscious were louder now, but they really weren’t like whispers at all. No words. Just … knowing. And with each passing minute this new way of thought was taking her over, replacing the clumsy connect-the-dots intelligence of humankind.
She was not alone anymore. No longer would she be left to pick her way through life, making her own path to revelations. She was suspended in a cloud of knowledge, and she was everywhere within it.
No, she thought. Not yet.
She struggled to keep her mind on track. She was human, human, human. And there was one thing she had to do before she could rest.
Love you.
She’d heard herself say it, the words mangled by her new vocal cords. What must he have thought, hearing those words from her, seeing her like this? But it didn’t matter. She’d told him. That was enough.
The thought sharpened her mind. She found the door she was looking for. The door with the blue light. She opened it and stepped into the boiler room.
The nanos had removed the fear from her, in order to ease her change. That was good. Without it, she might not have managed to enter that place, that infernal, steaming stew of black pipes and lurching metal bodies.
She moved warily inward. The presence of the Alpha Carrier was impossible to ignore. Though she could only see it as a shape in the fog, she was uncannily aware of it. It was more solid, more real, more there than any of the other Infected. It was important to her.
Important to the Infected, she told herself. Not to me.
Why was she here again? Oh, yes …
She moved among the heating tanks and pipes, reading the old stamped-iron signs there. PUMP CONTROL. STOKE HOLE. STEAM RELEASE. Lantern-eyed metal creatures slunk and shifted around her. She saw the Alpha Carrier pick up a runty Infected and crunch it down. After that, she made sure to stay far away.
She drifted, lost focus. It felt like slipping back into sleep when you were trying to get out of bed. She only knew she’d done it when she found herself on the other side of the boiler room, not sure how she’d gotten there. It alarmed her. Soon there would be nothing left of her, and only the Infected would remain.
One thing to do before that. Just one.
She concentrated, searched, and found what she was looking for. The main gas valve that fed the boiler. A metal turn-wheel projected from a thick pipe that came from the ground. She rolled it; it turned easily, driven by the strength of her metal limb.
There was a series of whuffing sounds as the boilers went out. All across the vast hall, the growling sound of gas flames died. After half a minute, all that was left were the eerie ticks and groans and creaks as the tanks cooled.
The Infected paid no attention. They ignored what she was doing. It didn’t matter to them whether the heating was on or off.
Now, she thought. Now.
It felt bad. It felt wrong. At first she couldn’t even bring herself to do it. Something was stopping her, some instinct. The Alpha Carrier! What about the Alpha Carrier?
She gritted her metal teeth, and forced out all the hatred she could manage. She thought of all the things she could have done in her life. All the joy she might have experienced. She might even have won over Paul, given time.
But the Infected had taken that away from her.
So she turned the wheel again, all the way open.
Sssssssssss …
The hollow, throaty hiss of gas.
She stepped away from the valve. It was not fear she was feeling now, but some other emotion, somewhere between guilt and disgust and self-loathing, something that begged her to undo what she’d done. But she wouldn’t. She moved off between the tanks, into the blue mist.
Gas, hissing from a thousand holes. The gas burners beneath the vast tanks. Once they were turned on, the operator was supposed to press the ignition to light them, just like a burner on a stove. Perhaps there was even some automatic safety system hidden among all this ancient Victorian pipework that would trigger the ignition automatically.
But there was no electricity. So the ignition couldn’t spark. And the gas kept coming.
Everyone who’d been at the academy long enough had heard the story of Billy McCarthy. The boy who’d died down in the boiler room, choked by gas. And everyone had heard about the janitor who went down into the gas-filled basement the next morning, and came a hairbreadth from blowing up the entire school.
She reached into a pocket with her human hand and took out what was inside.
Erika’s lighter.
A sense of unease stirred across her consciousness. A swirl in the cloud. She was not fully part of the network yet: It didn’t know her mind, couldn’t process her human thought. But in their vague way, the Infected sensed danger.
The creatures stirred as the room began to fill with gas. There was a sense of disquiet in their shuffling movements. Violent squabbles broke out here and there. The Alpha Carrier shifted its enormous body with a clattering of metal, as if discomfited.
The air became sharp and choking and it stank, but the Infected didn’t notice. She wondered if they could smell it at all. Many of them didn’t even have noses, and those that did had metal ones.
Caitlyn began to get light-headed. She felt herself slipping, her thoughts becoming fuzzy, and she bit her lip hard enough to bleed. The pain brought her back. If she let go, if she let her Infected side take over, she’d go back and turn off the gas. She had to keep control.
Think, she told herself. Think of anything. Anything but what you’re about to do.
What came to her was netball.
She remembered the game they’d played that morning. She remembered Soraya’s smiling face, Soraya, who’d thankfully gone home for the weekend and hadn’t been caught up in this yet. Oh, Soraya, I hope you’ll be okay. And she remembered Erika, Erika as goal shooter, receiving a pass from Caitlyn, coming to a halt, then her long limbs stretching as she popped another ball through the hoop.
Except in her memory there was no resentment, no hate, no sour jealousy in her heart. There was only the joy of the
game, the pleasure she took in the way they worked together, how they’d pass and move their way up the court, cutting through opponents like a hot knife through butter. Caitlyn, making the plays from the center of the court. Soraya, racing along the wing. Erika, on the spot to finish it off.
And so what if Erika took the glory? So what if she had the final shot? She’d never have even gotten there if not for Caitlyn and Soraya and the others.
We made a good team, she thought. We really did.
She clutched the lighter tight in her fist. Erika’s lighter. She remembered Erika’s tearful face, as she was pinned against the wall, a metal claw around her throat. “What did I ever do to make you hate me so much?” she’d asked.
Nothing. Nothing at all. It was always Caitlyn’s problem, all along.
She heard a hiss nearby, a hiss louder and more sinister than the gas leaking into the room. She looked up, her vision blurring as her human and Infected eyes fought for dominance.
One of the Infected was looking at her. Looking right at her. A tall, scrawny nightmare of a thing with a face of warped metal. Ripped overalls clung to its body. A janitor’s clothes.
And as she stood there, another one nearby turned to her. Then the one next to that. She heard a shifting and a crashing of metal, and turned that way.
Across the length of the chamber, two huge eyes were staring at her through the mist. The eyes of the Alpha Carrier.
They know, she thought. They’ve sensed it at last.
She raised Erika’s lighter, cupped it with her metal claw and held it up in front of her face. There was no fear. They’d taken it away. That was their mistake.
The Alpha Carrier screeched, and every Infected in the chamber howled at once, a noise like a hundred jet engines in a hurricane. They leaped toward her, gnashing, screaming, racing to tear her apart.
For us, she thought, and sparked a flame.
After that, there was only light.
Paul and Adam burst from the school and ran for their lives.
There was no time to do it any other way. Sneaking out of the basement had already delayed them too much. Paul had felt the urgency in Caitlyn’s voice when she spoke her last words to him, and knew that something dreadful was going to happen any second.
Run, she’d said. Run.
There was a scattering of Infected wandering the drive in front of the school. Glowing blue eyes turned toward Paul and Adam as they came out of the main entrance. Paul lobbed a flash bomb at them, its fuse already sparkling. The Infected had barely registered the attack before they were frozen into statues, and the boys raced past them at full pelt.
Run.
The flash bombs had become less effective every time they used them, and this time the Infected paused for only a few seconds. Paul and Adam had barely passed them before they were mobile again. They turned and gave chase, screeching. Other Infected nearby, alerted by the noise, turned their heads and saw the humans in their midst.
Then the school exploded.
The blast of concussion and heat picked them up and flung them forward, sending them rolling along the gravel of the drive. Paul found himself on his back, looking up at the moon, stunned. He became aware of new bruises pulsing with pain, skinned hands stinging, ears whistling. Everything was going in slow motion as he raised himself up on his elbows and looked around, dazed.
Flames licked from the windows of the lower floors of the school building. The walls bowed and the roof sagged. Stone cracked and split away as a section of the school collapsed in on itself. The Gothic facade bent and crumbled, toppling in a billow of flame.
Caitlyn, he thought, but in his confusion the name was just a name, and didn’t mean anything.
Someone grabbed him and pulled him to his feet. It was Adam. He was yelling something, but the words didn’t make any sense. Then he saw Adam was pointing toward the sports hall, toward the helicopter on the roof. That triggered something. Paul knew they were supposed to get there. He nodded, and began stumbling in that direction.
His senses returned as his head cleared from the blast. His face felt scorched and dry. Belatedly he remembered the Infected and looked to see if they were following. They weren’t. They were screaming instead. And now he could hear them over the shrill whine in his ears: wild, feral howls, the cries of the newly mad.
They’re in pain, he thought. Look at them. They’re in agony.
There was no time to think about why. Together Adam and Paul ran across the darkened lawn toward the sports hall. The Infected nearby paid them no attention. They shrieked and thrashed. One of them attacked another, and they ripped at each other viciously. The dangerous intelligence they’d possessed was slipping away. They were like beasts now, mindless savages tortured by some unseen force.
From within the school there was a roar, a buzz-saw bellow that froze the blood. Paul looked back as he ran. Something shifted within the flames; an avalanche of flaming rubble fell as it moved.
Is that … ? It can’t be …
A massive black shadow, engulfed in fire, passed behind burned-out windows.
“Oh, no …,” Paul murmured.
And then, with a roar that seemed to shake the earth, the Alpha Carrier burst through the wall of the school.
Erika screamed when she laid eyes on it.
Of all the awful things she’d seen tonight, this was the worst of them. It must have been twelve feet high, as big as a double-decker bus: monstrous, misshapen, cloaked in flame. It was melting and re-forming as she watched, silver metal dripping and running down its face, solidifying into new forms and then melting all over again. It staggered out onto the driveway at the front of the school, and the great dark building caved in behind it, throwing up smoke and dust and fire into the night.
Tiny in comparison, Paul and Adam fled from it, sprinting toward the sports hall with all the speed they could manage.
“Run!” she shrieked at them. “Ruuun!”
Carson seized her by the arm and pulled her away from the edge of the roof.
“Come on,” he said, his voice low and hard.
“What? Get off me!” she cried, angry at being manhandled.
Carson was relentless, doing his best to drag her toward the helicopter using only one good leg. “We’re going. Now.” He raised his voice. “Everyone! Get in!”
Freckles and Pudge scrambled into the helicopter and began strapping themselves into the seats in the back. Johnny, who was standing nearby, said, “What about the others?”
“Get off me!” Erika shrieked again, and kicked Carson in the shin. He let go of her with a curse, lost his balance, and had to hop away a few steps to keep from falling over.
“Alright, you stupid cow. Stay here,” he snarled. “I’m going.” And he hopped toward the chopper.
“Hey! What about the others?” Johnny demanded again. But Carson was already settling himself into the cockpit, flicking switches, pressing buttons. The ascending whine of the helicopter’s engines kicked in, and the rotors began to slowly turn.
Erika looked back at Paul and Adam. The bigger kid was dragging behind, tired. Paul was forced to slow down to the same speed.
Faster! You need to go faster!
At the sound of the rotors, the Alpha Carrier turned its huge, malformed head, its blue eyes staring out from beneath dripping curtains of melted metal. Its gaze fixed on the chopper, on Erika. She quailed beneath that dread regard.
It began to lumber toward them. Staggering forward on all fours, cable-like sinews straining, silver skin running like wax, it set off across the lawn, following Paul and Adam.
Erika looked back at the chopper. Her arm still hurt from where Carson had grabbed it. Was he really going to take off? Was he really going to leave them there? And yet if they stayed to wait for the others, would any of them make it?
The beast was coming for them.
Adam felt on the verge of a heart attack by the time he climbed through the broken window and fell into the back office of the spo
rts hall. He lay on the ground, gasping, as Paul climbed in after him. His whole body was burning. He’d already thrown up once as he ran, a thin stream of bile that splattered his thighs, and he felt like he was going to do it again. His head felt light; every part of his body ached. This was worse than any beating he’d ever taken.
“Get up!” Paul yelled, already dragging him up.
Leave me alone. Get your bloody hands off me.
He was too weak. He couldn’t get up again. He’d never in his life sprinted that hard for that long. Once out of the basement, they’d run all the way through the school and all the way across the lawn at breakneck speed. Even when they got to the sports hall, they’d had to circle around the back to find the way in, because the doors were locked. There was no strength left in him. His body just couldn’t push out any more.
“Get up! Get up!” Paul was trying to haul him up, but he was dead weight.
“Can’t …,” he gasped. “Let me catch my …” He threw up again before he could finish.
Paul was frantic. He didn’t even let him finish being sick before he was tugging at him again. “Come on! Didn’t you see that thing? We have to get to the chopper now!”
“I can’t …,” he gasped, and that was when Paul hit him.
It wasn’t particularly hard. He’d taken harder punches and laughed them off. But the pain of it shocked him. Paul had hit him over the head. Paul! Paul, whom he thought he trusted. Paul, whom he’d begun to think of as a friend.
He just stared, surprised. Paul hit him again.
Dark anger curdled in his gut. Paul was just like the rest. Just like everyone else who pretended to be on his side, pretended to be his friend. They were just waiting for the moment to stick the knife in. Waiting for the right time to ridicule him, to beat him, to leave him behind.
Paul hit him a third time. Adam lunged at him, grabbing at his feet, but Paul stepped back and out of the way, and Adam fell on his face.
Rage and frustration flooded through him, driving him to his feet. His eyes narrowed, his face reddened, his fists clenched. His blood was hot, and there was new strength in him now. He’d batter Paul for what he’d done.