Dead Man Running (19 page)

‘We have to get off the floor,' he said. He glanced up at the maze of water pipes that lined the ceiling. ‘Follow me.'

He ran to the wall and climbed the power cables up to the ceiling. When he got there, he grabbed one of the pipes and hung from one hand and reached out to Ten with the other. Ten grabbed it, and Six swung him up to the pipes. They dangled like the stuffed monkeys Six had seen in the fake jungle. Soon the floor was red hot and lit up like a blacksmith's tools. The room creaked as the metal expanded.

‘What if the lava breaks through?' Ten's voice was hoarse.

‘It won't,' Six said. ‘Lerke's designs never fail.' But he was worried. Had he condemned them both to a fiery death?

A mighty thunderclap ripped through the base. For a moment Six thought it might have been the Deck's bomb arriving. But the sound had come from below. Probably – hopefully – it was the base's foundations splintering.

‘The pipes are getting hot,' Ten said.

‘Just hang on!'

The room was moving. Six could feel it. Not sideways, but upwards – it was like being inside an oven that was inside a lift during an earthquake.

Heat rises, he thought. And the base is filled with air. We might float away.

The floor was visibly bubbling. Bright yellow spots were growing all over it. It was like a gateway to hell had opened up beneath them. The heat was cracking Six's skin.

The door leading to the museum burst open. The heat must have weakened the frame. The gorilla charged in, impossibly big in the small room, apparently oblivious of the fire below. Its glass eyes swivelled to face Six.

‘Ten!' Six yelled. ‘Take a deep breath!'

Ten did. Six followed suit, wincing as the hot air burned his lungs.

The gorilla took a step towards him. Another. A giant hand swung through the air –

The floor imploded under the gorilla's weight, filling the room with sparks. Shrieking, the gorilla splashed into the mixture of sea water and molten lava and started batting at it like a man drowning in quicksand, silhouetted by a fiery halo. Its eyes melted as it sank out of sight.

The lava was flooding in even as the sea water cooled it, solidifying it into lumpy black rocks. Six turned his face away as the burning stones pelted him. It felt like someone had upended a tip truck filled with hot coals on top of him.

He kept his mouth shut and his lungs full. He and Ten were going to have to swim out of here – he couldn't afford to waste a single millilitre of oxygen.

The roaring was suddenly dulled. The water had overtaken his head – the room was full. Six opened his eyes, squinting against the heat. Rocks were gliding through the water all around him like asteroids. Ten was still clinging to the pipes, eyes screwed shut. Six grabbed Ten's arm, and the other agent whirled to look at him, alarmed. Six beckoned, and began to swim down towards the shattered floor. Ten followed.

The lava had stopped flowing in. There was a hard, mountainous spike of it in the centre of the room, the tip of which was pressed against the ceiling. Six swam between it and what remained of the wall, and found himself in the open ocean.

There was light from far below. Lava was leaking out all over Surabaya. The initial eruption had solidified into a rocky tree, hundreds of metres high, black branches knuckled out in all directions.

Something moved on the horizon. A silver object, plunging downwards. It vanished into the gloom, and then there was a flash below, brighter than any of Six's flares. The buildings of Surabaya crumbled like papier-mâché.

There goes the Deck's bomb, Six thought.

He looked up. Just above the base he could see daylight. The volcano had carried it almost all the way to the surface. He glanced back to check that Ten was still with him, and then he swam upwards, desperate to taste the air. His lungs burned. His skin stung. He could barely see.

But he wasn't going to drown. Not today. Not after everything he'd gone through. He was going to see that cloudy, polluted sunshine.

With a splash, his head breached the surface. He sucked in a tremendous gulp of air, which was salty and tainted yet perfect. The setting sun was faintly visible through the smog on the horizon.

Ten emerged beside him, choking and gasping and somehow laughing too. ‘Christ,' he said, when he could talk. ‘You sure know how to travel.'

Six floated on his back, staring up at the fog. There was a helicopter hovering overhead – probably the one that had dropped the bomb. He waved, hoping the pilot was still looking down.

‘Wow, that's lucky,' Ten said. ‘If that hadn't been here, how would we have got home?'

‘We'd have swum,' Six said, and as he watched the chopper circle back around, he realised that for the first time since his resurrection, he was glad to be alive.

FLIGHT PATH

The pilot was a young woman with a nose-stud. Her face was inscrutable under her flight goggles as Six climbed the rope ladder into the cabin.

‘Strap yourself in quick,' the pilot said. ‘I have to get back to the City, ASAP.'

‘Low on fuel?' Ten asked. He was already buckled into one of the seats.

‘Nope. Some kind of viral outbreak. People are dropping dead all over the place. I'm picking up a hazmat team from the Deck so they can steal one of the bodies from a ChaoSonic morgue and study the infection for themselves.'

It never ends, Six thought. No matter how many good guys we save or bad guys we lock up, there's always more work to do.

He tried to close his hand again, but his fingers kept spasming outwards. What use will I be now? he wondered.

Ten said, ‘Can you drop us off at the Deck?'

‘No time to take you anywhere else.' The pilot pulled on the altimeter and pushed the cyclic. The helicopter roared up into the fog.

‘Hey, Six,' Ten said.

Six looked at him.

‘We're alive.'

Six couldn't help but smile. ‘Yeah,' he said. ‘We are.'

‘What's the first thing you're going to do when we get back?'

‘I'm going to have some actors arrested.'

Ten burst out laughing. ‘Any in particular?'

‘The whole cast of that hospital program.'

‘Oh, good idea. I hate that show.' He stared out the window. ‘I don't know what I'm going to do.'

‘I think first you should probably get some medical attention.'

‘Oh yeah.' Ten's smile faded as he poked gingerly at the wounds on his arms. ‘Harriet's going to freak when she sees this,' he muttered. Then to Six he said, ‘The crazy old man – why did he kill those eighty-nine people?'

‘He didn't,' Six said. He could still hear Lerke's voice.
I just put their remains to good use.

‘Damn. I thought I'd solved the case.'

‘You?
I
led you down there, I stopped him from drilling holes in you, and then I got you out. How does that count as you solving the case?'

‘How do you know he didn't do it?'

Six sighed. ‘Because Ace tested the blood Double Tap left at the Deck. It's Kyntak's.'

‘Your brother?'

Six nodded.

Ten said, ‘Can you be objective?'

When he'd asked that before, he'd wanted to know whether Six could accurately assess Nai's guilt. Now, Six knew, Ten was asking a different question. He wanted to know if Six could do the right thing when he found Kyntak.

As a Deck agent, Six was supposed to arrest him so that he could be ‘shuffled' – locked up until a psychological examiner decided that the likelihood of his re-offending was less than fifty per cent. Many of the Deck's inmates died of old age in their cells, having never passed the test.

But when Six came face to face with Kyntak, would family loyalty inspire him to let his brother go? Or would the sense of betrayal drive him to a worse punishment than Kyntak deserved?

‘I don't know,' Six said.

‘Do you want me to make the arrest?'

Six tried to imagine what Kyntak would do to Ten if he tried to arrest him. The chances of Ten coming back alive seemed negligible.

He shook his head. ‘I have to.' Not just because no-one else can, he thought. Not just because he's family. But because all the victims were my friends, and I need to ask him
why
.

Ten leaned back against his seat. ‘Well, I'll come along as your backup.'

‘You don't have to do that.'

‘Yes I do. Like I said before, you're not leaving my sight until we find Nai.'

Six sighed. ‘Look at you. You can't run, you can't fight – you're barely alive.'

‘Maybe,' Ten said. ‘But you won't use force to stop me. You don't have the heart.'

‘You're no good to me,' Six said, trying to sound as heartless as possible.

‘Not physically, no. But psychologically, you could use the help.'

Six grimaced. ‘I don't need a shoulder to cry on.'

‘I was thinking more like a moral compass.'

The Seawall was visible through the fog up ahead, like a giant grey iceberg.

‘Are we going to make it across without ChaoSonic shooting us down?' Six asked the pilot.

‘You don't understand,' she said. ‘That virus I told you about? It's a big deal. All ChaoSonic employees are either dealing with the threat or quarantined. There's no-one watching the wall.'

‘What are the symptoms?'

‘None. People just collapse. It's like a heart attack, but with none of the warning signs. Whatever it is, it's spreading fast – the first case was only fifteen minutes ago, and now it's all over the City. The morgues are filling up in every ChaoSonic facility, and the first autopsy hasn't even been finished yet.'

She paused, listening to her radio, and then said, ‘This is Peregrine, go ahead.'

ChaoSonic had once tried to release a weaponised strain of the SARS virus in order to suppress a rebellion. Six wondered if this new disease was something they'd created which had gotten the better of them. It seemed likely.

Six thought of Nadel Panuros, ranting and raving on the train.
So intricate, the things the human mind can produce.

Lerke poisoned me, Six thought, and tried to convince me my life had been a dream, to get information. He was probably also the one who poisoned Nadel Panuros. So what information was he trying to get from him?

‘Copy that.' The pilot glanced back at Six and Ten. ‘There's no hurry any more – the Deck managed to find a body nearby and bring it back for autopsy. So we'll probably touch down in about three minutes, unless you're in a particular rush.'

Six shook his head and turned to Ten. ‘When Lerke was torturing you, what kinds of questions did he ask?'

‘At first he just wanted to know who I was and why I was there,' Ten said. ‘But when I wouldn't say anything, he must have worked out I was a Deck agent, because he started asking me about general security stuff. What were the codes for the Deck's doors, did we have air cover, that sort of thing. Why?'

‘Did he ask about the location?'

‘No.'

Six frowned. There could only be one reason Lerke wouldn't have asked. He must already have known.

Six thought of King's description of Panuros:
He's got influence in every department of the company.
He would have known the location of every ChaoSonic facility, and how to get into them.

‘Does it matter?' Ten said. ‘I mean, he's dead now, right?'

‘I wouldn't be so sure.' Despite what Lerke had told him about there being no way out of the underwater base, Six had never known his creator to be caught without an exit strategy. He wouldn't be surprised if Lerke had jumped in one of the boxes he'd been using to transport undead soldiers, and floated away inside it.

Transport. Where had Lerke been planning to transport the Revived to?

Six's heart skipped a beat. ‘Ten,' he said. ‘What if Lerke wanted to overthrow ChaoSonic?'

‘Himself?' Ten sounded incredulous.

‘Why not? He's got as much manpower as he needs. Who knows how many corpses he's reanimated?'

‘But it's not just a matter of manpower. You've seen ChaoSonic facilities – they're incredibly well defended. How would he get his troops inside?'

‘By instructing them to walk around near the facilities, and then switching them off so they seem to drop dead. When they get brought inside for autopsy, he can switch them back on, and they can attack from within.'

Ten's eyes were wide. ‘You think this viral outbreak is fake? That Lerke staged it to get his troops into ChaoSonic buildings?'

Six nodded. ‘That's the sort of insane thing he'd do.'

‘But the wounds that killed all the Revived we've seen have been visible. How could they have blended in before they were switched off?'

‘Poison, electrocution – not all deaths leave obvious marks. Maybe so far we've only seen his leftovers. Maybe he has
thousands
of troops.'

‘And now there's one inside the Deck,' Ten said.

‘Coming in to land,' the pilot called.

Six looked out the window at the buildings below. He saw the helipad on the roof of the Deck – and the grey-skinned, hollow-eyed man standing on top of it. He was covered in blood, only some of which appeared to be his own, leaking from the colander of bullet holes in his chest. He seemed oblivious of his injuries. He was, Six realised, one of Lerke's undead footsoldiers.

And he was holding a rocket launcher.

‘Turn back!' Six screamed. ‘Now!'

‘What the hell?' the pilot yelled as she saw the dead man raising the launcher. She twisted the steering yoke and the helicopter lurched sideways.

There was a sharp hiss as the Revived pulled the trigger. A wisp of smoke uncoiled along the helipad as the rocket blasted up towards them.

Six grabbed the safety rail bolted to the cabin door. ‘Hold on,' he shouted.

BOOM!
The floor of the helicopter disappeared, blown apart by the impact, and suddenly Six's legs were hanging in empty air. The streets were spinning far below.

‘We're going down!' the pilot yelled. Several different alarms were blaring and whooping from the controls in front of her.

There's no landing gear, Six thought wildly. How do you do an emergency landing with no landing gear?

Some kind of battle was happening below. He couldn't see it, but the further they plummeted, the better he could hear the clattering of machine guns and cries of horror. As the helicopter spun, the war zone swung into view – dozens of ChaoSonic troops were retreating under the streetlights, running from hundreds of the Revived. Judging from the gore that stained the hands of the walking corpses, they were armed with something more lethal than tranquilliser rings.

It's ChaoSonic versus the living dead down there, Six thought. And we're going to crash right in the middle of it.

A mountain of crushed cars in an alleyway was visible through one of the shattered windows. ‘Aim for the cars,' Six roared. People survived falls of more than ten thousand metres onto cars, he reminded himself. Maybe we'll make it through this.

Perhaps the pilot heard him, or perhaps she'd already known that this was their best chance of survival. She yanked on the controls and the helicopter tipped over sideways towards the mountain.

‘Further!' Six yelled. ‘You're going to miss!'

‘The engine's shot! There's no more power!'

The cabin was filling with black smoke. It was like being smothered under foul-smelling pillows. Six fought to keep his grip on the safety rail.

The gunfire and screaming was getting louder. ‘Go limp!' Six shouted, hoping Ten and the pilot could still hear him. ‘You might survive if you –'

Wham.

The helicopter slammed down onto the pile of crushed cars like a sledgehammer onto a stereo. Metal shrieked and sparks sprayed the cabin. Suddenly there was no cabin and Six was falling alone, still holding the severed safety rail in one hand. He could hear the helicopter rolling through the debris, but he couldn't see it – he couldn't see anything.

A bullbar thumped into his stomach. Broken windows scraped his cheek. His elbow cracked a tail-light. He landed with a crash on his back in the remains of a semi-crushed convertible, and then there was a mighty heaving sound as other cars collapsed inwards to fill the hole he'd left behind. Soon he was buried alive.

He was dizzy. He couldn't breathe. He couldn't move.

Stay conscious, Six ordered himself.

He didn't.

It was the smell that woke him. Death and rust. Like a roast chicken left unattended in a cold oven for twenty years.

The light was faint, but seemed to come from all around. Distant moonlight, reflected through thousands of broken headlights and windscreens and rear-vision mirrors. It was like being trapped inside a giant geode.

Six turned his head slowly. Broken glass tinkled out of his hair. He was lying on the back seat of a car. There was a dead body in the driver's seat – Six could see the back of his skull, his time-stained clothes draped over his bony shoulders, his skin stretched tight over the cartilage of his ears. It must have been years since the ChaoSonic bulldozers had trapped him in here.

The front of the car was almost pulped. Six guessed that the driver's legs had probably been crushed under the steering wheel, pinning him to the seat. Otherwise he would have climbed out of the convertible.

Looking around for a way out, Six saw only tyres and windscreens and crumpled doors. He was walled in on every side, including above and below. He could already feel the oxygen getting thin.

‘Ten?' he yelled.

Silence.

He'd never known the helicopter pilot's name, but he called out anyway. ‘Pilot?'