Jiggs finally steered himself onto a parallel trajectory, then closed the distance with blips from his thruster. As he made out more through his monoscope, he was filled with hope when he saw what appeared to be one of the team from the Bergen and the booster rocket trailing behind on the end of a lanyard. With a final burst of speed, he was near enough to take hold of the drifting form. He seized the Bergen, which was still smouldering in places, then turned the body towards him.
‘My God! It’s you, Drake!’ he cried.
But it wasn’t just Drake – there was someone else with him, although this second person was so badly hurt as to be almost unrecognisable.
Jiggs concentrated on Drake to start with. Even from a cursory inspection, Jiggs could tell that he was in a very bad way. Patches of his fatigues had been blasted completely away, and the flesh underneath scorched black. Some of Drake’s hair was missing, and his head covered in angry red blisters from the crown and down one side of his face. Jiggs felt his neck for a pulse – he found one, but it was very weak. He must have been in close proximity to the bomb when it detonated, which explained why he’d been moving so fast. And it also probably meant that he’d been bathed in radiation.
Then Jiggs moved on to the second person, twisting the head round so he could see their features.
It was Rebecca One.
Drake had obviously employed the same tactic as Jiggs and swept her over into the void to take her out of the running. Then they’d been involved in a struggle, which explained why she was tangled up in a coil of rope attached to the side of Drake’s Bergen.
Jiggs didn’t bother to check her for a pulse. Her body was so charred that there was no question that the Rebecca twin was dead. ‘Hah! Fashion victim!’ he observed, as part of her coat crumbled at his touch. ‘That’s what you get for wearing black round a nuclear explosion,’ he added without a shred of sympathy.
He was correct – the non-reflective surface of her matt black Styx coat had done an admirable job of absorbing the pulse of heat and light. And, as Jiggs tried to disentangle her arm from the rope, it cracked as if it was made of charcoal. He could see that, of the two, she’d come off far worse than Drake. Indeed, she must have helped him by shielding much of his body from the blast.
Jiggs quickly searched the twin’s body for anything useful, but other than a few items in the pouches on her belt, it was difficult to tell what was her and what were the remains of her incinerated clothing. Everything had been fused together by the heat.
For a moment Jiggs simply regarded the slight body of Rebecca One. For someone so young, she had been responsible for so much suffering. ‘You don’t deserve any last words,’ he snarled, then unceremoniously heaved her away into the darkness.
Jiggs was checking Drake’s pulse again when he heard him trying to say something, although it was little more than a murmur. ‘Take it easy there, old man. Just you hang on,’ Jiggs tried to comfort him, forced to shout over the din of the Crystal Belt. He unhitched his medical pack from his belt, fishing out a syrette of morphine. ‘Something for the pain,’ he said to Drake, as he jammed the syrette against the injured man’s thigh.
It was only then that Jiggs felt the moisture on his face and looked up sharply. He had become so accustomed to bowling along at speed through this low-gravity environment that he’d completely forgotten he and Drake were still very much on the move.
‘No!’ Jiggs just had enough time to yell as they ploughed straight into a huge globule of water. Although Jiggs didn’t have much of an opportunity to gauge its size, it was around twenty feet in diameter. At least, it was until they hit it.
Their momentum was such that it disintegrated into thousands of smaller droplets. And then there were more of these suspended mega-droplets of all sizes in Jiggs’ path. Coughing from the water he’d inhaled, he simultaneously tried to shield Drake’s face, dodge the larger droplets and fire up his booster, which had taken such a dousing that it had gone out.
As he attempted to protect Drake from another soaking, Jiggs’ feet skimmed the circumference of a droplet the size of a house – this one didn’t break apart but wobbled like a giant jelly. ‘Space surfing!’ Jiggs exclaimed, as he managed to restart the booster, then frantically sought some unoccupied air space. He needed a safe place to stop and administer some urgent first aid to Drake.
In a clearing of smaller droplets, he made out an angular and familiar shape.
‘What the …?’ he yelled. He really couldn’t comprehend what he was seeing. He tried to use the booster to reach it, but overshot and had to backtrack. As he jetted them both closer, he was able to confirm his first impression.
It was a Short Sunderland – a seaplane that had been out of regular service for nearly fifty years and was these days more likely to be found in an aviation museum. It was a sizeable aircraft, capable of carrying a good twenty-four passengers. One wing had been torn off and the cockpit was badly damaged, but the rest of the fuselage seemed to be intact apart from a few holes in the tail section.
Still not believing what he was seeing, Jiggs manoeuvred towards it as he remembered the Russian submarine in Smoking Jean, and what Drake himself had said about pores opening up on the surface from time to time. So could some twist of fate be the reason that this seaplane had been sucked down too? Caught in a whirlpool that had brought it all the way down to this inner space?
Much of the white paint remained on the fuselage, although it was stained by patches of rust, particularly around the rivets. And long tendrils of some kind of black algae had anchored itself in clumps all over the exterior, waving in the air currents like fine black hairs.
Reaching the large float under the surviving wing, Jiggs braced himself against it, then with a push of his legs directed himself at a door on which Emergency Exit had been stencilled. He tugged on the handle. It refused to open, so he used his handgun to shoot out the lock and hinges. With another tug, the door came away with a burst of rust. Jiggs allowed it to float off, then entered the aircraft with Drake.
Although the windows amazingly weren’t broken in this section of the seaplane, everything was damp inside – the fabric of the seats and the carpet almost rotted completely away and covered with a grey slime. In one of the rows Jiggs spied two skeletons. Their bony arms were clasped around each other and from the way their skulls were touching, there was no question they’d been in a final embrace at the moment of death.
‘I’d have done the same,’ Jiggs confided to them.
But he didn’t have time to examine what else was in there as he gently laid Drake on the floor and set about tending to him. Battlefield triage was nothing new to Jiggs. Slipping Drake’s Bergen off and removing the booster tied to his wrist, he methodically catalogued the areas that needed attention. Having worked his way along each of Drake’s limbs and then the trunk of his body, he quickly found the injury to his shoulder.
‘That’s no burn. That’s a bullet wound,’ he mumbled to himself, then glanced at the welts on Drake’s head and the charred areas of his combats, which would need to be carefully removed to assess the damage to the tissue beneath them. ‘But it’s probably the least of our problems.’
He scanned the cabin around him as he voiced his concerns out loud. ‘Major trauma from third-degree burns … huge risk of infection from this septic environment … and unless there are any supplies here, just my medikit to work with.’ He rolled up his sleeves. ‘Hey ho,’ he whispered grimly. ‘Off to work we go.’
If Drake had any hope of pulling through, at least he was in capable hands. Jiggs was highly proficient in field medicine. In some of the places he’d been sent – often the middle of nowhere – he’d frequently been called upon to use his skills to save both himself and those around him.
But now Jiggs suddenly noticed his patient had stopped breathing.
‘No, you don’t, old man. You’re not going to die on me.’ He leant over and gave Drake mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. ‘Not today,’ he said, as he began
to thump his chest to get his heart beating again. ‘Not on my watch.’
PART ONE
Aftermath
Chapter One
Schraack!
The small skull split open under Will’s boot, the hollow sound resounding through the empty New Germanian street. Will hadn’t been looking where he was treading as he’d moved towards the pavement, and had completely failed to notice the diminutive skeleton stretched out in the gutter.
‘Oh … my … good … God,’ Will swallowed as he stood over the skeleton, which had to have been that of a child. Although very little brain tissue remained inside the skull, the sight of the empty pupal casings spilling out was horrifying. The climate of this inner world with its ever-burning sun couldn’t have been more favourable for the armies of voracious flies, which had stripped the flesh from the human skeletons in a matter of weeks. Eight weeks to be precise. And stripped it so efficiently that the stench of decay that once hung over the dead city had almost completely vanished.
Everywhere Will looked there were sun-bleached bones, mostly poking from crumpled clothes. Since the virus had also killed off all the mammals that would normally have scavenged on the remains, the bodies had lain undisturbed, still precisely where they had fallen.
Undisturbed except for the carrion-feeding birds. Avian species had been spared by the virus, and a little further along the road Will spotted two fat crows playing tug of war over something beside a discarded hat. They didn’t bother to move until he was almost on them.
‘Get away!’ he shouted, aiming his foot at them. Beating their greasy black wings and giving ugly calls, they grudgingly took to the air.
Will saw what the crows had been fighting over. On the tarmac was a human eyeball, so desiccated and discoloured it resembled a rotten plum.
He couldn’t stop himself from staring at the eyeball as it stared accusingly back at him, its ragged optic nerve strung out behind it like a tail, as though it was some kind of new animal.
‘This is so wrong,’ Will whispered, suddenly overwhelmed by all the signs of death around him. People had clearly left their homes in their thousands to gather here in the centre of the city, where they’d succumbed to the virus. They must have been desperately hoping that their government was going to do something to save them from the disease that could cause death in as little as twenty-four hours.
‘Hey, dozy, what is it?’ Elliott shouted. Finding that Will hadn’t followed her into the large department store they’d been heading towards, she’d reappeared through the shattered glass of one of the doors.
‘We did this,’ he managed to reply. ‘We’re to blame for all this.’
‘We never meant for it to come to this,’ Elliott said, as she surveyed the bodies.
Of course Will knew that Elliott was right; Sweeney must have accidentally broken the test tube Drake had given him. It was never the intention to actually release the deadly virus. But it didn’t make Will feel any better about what he was seeing.
Elliott shrugged. ‘They were doomed anyway. Most of them had been Darklit. Sooner or later, they’d have ended up as either hosts or food for the Phase.’ She was silent for a moment. ‘Perhaps this is better, Will. Perhaps we did them a favour.’
He began towards her, shaking his head slowly. ‘That’s difficult to believe.’
As soon as they were inside the shop, Will stopped to take in the fountain – a large bronze dolphin in the centre of a circular pool set into the marble floor. Although the water had long since stopped spouting from the mouth of the dolphin, both it and the polished marble floors gave the impression of incredible affluence from a bygone age on the outer surface.
‘This was quite some shop,’ Will said.
‘Those people obviously thought so,’ Elliott agreed, as she left Will peering around at the cadavers on the floor, some with bags crammed full of items still clutched in their skeletal arms.
‘They must have known things were bad, but even so they were grabbing whatever they could,’ he said, as he poked one of the bags with the barrel of his Sten and expensive-looking lipsticks and face creams spilled from it. He laughed, though emptily. ‘They were even stealing make-up!’
‘Come over here. You’ve got to see this!’ Elliott shouted, her voice resounding through the huge main hall.
‘Wow,’ Will said. There was an imposing statue at the end of the hall, on either side of which a pair of staircases swept up to the other levels of the shop. The statue, which was a good fifty feet in height, was of a woman dressed in a toga and proudly displaying a cornucopia of fruit.
But what stopped Will in his tracks was the enormous smoked glass dome that served as the roof of the hall. In wonder he craned his head back to take it all in. Without anyone around to keep it clean, wind-borne grit was already building up at the edges of the dome and encroaching on the glass, but the effect was still breathtaking.
Will lowered his gaze from the dome, taking in the other floors on the way down, where he could just about make out all the different goods on display there.
‘This place is ginormous – like Harrods or something. Where do we start?’ he asked. He stepped over to a counter and wiped the layer of dust from its surface to peer at the range of meerschaum pipes arranged on crumpled velvet. Then he leant over the counter as he examined the showcases behind it. The glass doors had been wrenched off, and many brands of cigarettes he’d never heard of were inside. ‘Lande Mokri Superb. Sulima,’ he read, scanning along the row of old-fashioned packets. ‘Joltams, Pyramide.’ Then he noticed a dead body slumped by the base of the showcase, dressed in a pinstripe suit and with a packet still held tightly in its dried-out hand. ‘Tch, tch!’ Will said, wagging a finger. ‘Those things will kill you, you know,’ he admonished the corpse.
‘We can get everything we need here,’ Elliott called from another counter where she’d helped herself to two umbrellas – essential items in this world where the weather had only two defaults: blinding sunshine or fierce monsoons that descended with no warning at all. ‘Will, what do you reckon’s through there?’ she asked, indicating a row of doors along the side of the hall with signs above them proclaiming Lebensmittelabteilung.
‘One way to find out,’ he replied, already making straight for the nearest pair of doors and pushing them open.
If the reek of rotten food wasn’t disgusting enough, the maelstrom of flies that Will and Elliott’s entrance stirred up would have deterred most people from entering. But not Elliott.
‘Must be something we can take?’ she asked, despite the fact that the flies were everywhere in the food hall.
As Will waved the teeming bluebottles away from his face, he caught glimpses of the different counters selling cheese, food and meat, their once-chilled displays now a mass of putrefaction and writhing with maggots. And not only was the once-pristine white-tiled floor smeared with filth, it was also littered with the remains of dead rats. They’d obviously thought they were on to a good thing until the virus had finished them off too.
‘Oh, God, let’s just get out of here!’ Will yelled, frantically swatting the flies away from him.
‘But there’s tinned food over th—’ Elliott was shouting and pointing, as a fly shot straight into her mouth.
‘No way. We can get our supplies somewhere else,’ Will insisted, as he and Elliott stumbled back through the doors, which swung shut, sealing them off from the stench and insects again. Except for the one lodged at the back of Elliott’s throat.
‘Fly,’ she wheezed, pointing at her mouth. She was coughing and making noises like a cat trying to bring up a fur ball.
She looked so comical that Will began to chuckle. ‘Is that tasty?’ he asked. Then he couldn’t help himself, doubling up with laughter. This didn’t amuse Elliott in the slightest, her face flushed from all the coughing.
‘It’s not funny, you creep,’ she managed to get out between all the coughing. Then she gulped loudly and grimaced. ‘Yuck. I think I swallowed it.’ r />
‘Well, you did say we needed more meat in our diet,’ Will quipped.
Then she too was laughing and coughing and thrusting the stock of her long rifle at him, as he backed away, pretending to be terrified by her attack.
‘Hey, spider woman, be careful with that, will you!’ he yelled, as he sidestepped yet again, only just managing to avoid her rifle.
Will realised immediately what he’d said. They’d had the misfortune of meeting Vane, one of the Styx women, when they’d been ambushed at the top of the pore.
Even the Styx themselves hadn’t known the reason for it, but this inner world had energised Vane, enabling her to restart the Phase. But it was more than just that; it had allowed her to produce Styx Warrior Class larvae in numbers that were off the scale. But, as a consequence, Vane had begun to resemble a hideously bloated arachnid. And given Elliott’s parentage, it wasn’t surprising that she was particularly sensitive whenever the subject came up, to the extent that she and Will rarely discussed it.
Elliott was standing very still with her rifle still poised in mid-air, her expression stony. ‘What did you just say?’ she demanded.
‘I … I … that … that came out wrong,’ Will gabbled. He took a hasty step back as Elliott’s expression turned thunderous.
‘Spider woman?’ she growled. ‘Just because I’ve got Styx blood in me doesn’t mean I’m suddenly going to turn into one of those monsters.’
‘I know. I’m sorry,’ Will said.
Elliott cracked a smile. ‘Gotcha!’
Relieved that he hadn’t really upset her, the boy nevertheless swung on his heels and made off.
Elliott raised her arm in front of her face and moved it in an impression of one of the ovipositors that had snaked from Vane’s mouth. ‘Where are you going, juicy human?’ she shouted after Will. In fits of laughter, she gave chase, and Will was laughing too as he careered between the shop counters in the direction of the staircases at the end of the hall.