Viridian (6 page)

‘But that's just what some of us secretly wish for,' said Viridian in silky smooth tones. ‘To go back to the bad old days.'

The other Cultivars looked sideways at each other. They were murmuring doubtfully. But Viridian was powerful, a brilliant rising star. No one dared cross him.

Except Teal.

‘I don't believe it,' she burst out, her green eyes fiery. ‘I'm senior to you, Viridian. I recruited you. I won't have you spreading dangerous rumours. Be quiet, unless you have proof that one of us warned him!'

‘Oh, I have proof,' said Viridian, softly. ‘It's here, on the Immune's phone. He dropped it, as they were escaping.'

He held up Jay's mobile for them to see. ‘The traitor's number is on this phone, showing they were in contact. He also texted her about twenty minutes ago, to tell her everything had gone according to plan.'

‘Her?' said Teal.

She gazed into Viridian's triumphant eyes, then looked at the number on the screen of the phone he held. And for the first time, she began to feel afraid.

She grabbed her mobile from the pocket of her combat trousers. It had been switched off, like all the Cultivars' phones, as they marched over the fields.

She switched it on.

‘I think you'll find,' said Viridian, as he snatched the phone from her, ‘that the Immune's message is in your inbox.'

‘That's no proof!' said Teal. Her voice sounded desperate. She saw that the Cultivars had moved away as if they didn't want to be contaminated. Now she was standing alone.

‘I have much more proof,' said Viridian. Every Cultivar was quiet, listening. He had them hooked. ‘It's on your laptop back at the Research Station. All sorts of sickening stuff about how Immunes must be saved and the virus must be eliminated.'

‘You've hacked into my computer,' whispered Teal. ‘I didn't write that.'

She realized, with a flash of pure terror, that she'd totally underestimated what a dangerous and ruthless rival Viridian was. But it was too late now.

‘No more lies,' said Viridian. He turned his eyes, glowing with conviction, to the other Cultivars. ‘Arrest the traitor.'

Two Cultivars moved alongside Teal. Each grasped one of her arms.

‘What about the Immune?' asked another Cultivar.

‘Catch him and kill him. Death to all Immunes. Now I'm in charge here, things will change. There'll be nowhere for Immunes to hide.'

‘And what about spies and Immune Sympathisers?' asked the other Cultivar.

‘They must be Etiolated,' said Viridian. ‘Without mercy.'

Dad drove like a maniac. It was lucky there weren't any police cars about. In fact, there wasn't much traffic at all.

‘Where are all the lorries?' said Jay, gazing down the eerily empty motorway. He was worried for about two seconds because truck drivers were their main customers. Until he remembered that Rainbirds Diner didn't exist any more.

Dad said, ‘There's no lorries because there's no deliveries. Businesses all over the world must be going bust. What do Verdans need to buy? Nothing.'

‘Except minerals,' said Jay, pointing to a tanker trundling down a slip road. It said, ‘NITRATES' on the side.

‘They don't even need to buy those,' said Dad. ‘They can get them by licking rocks. Get down!'

Dad took one hand off the wheel, slammed it on top of Jay's skull and shoved him down out of sight. ‘It's OK, he's gone,' said he added after a minute, lifting his hand.

‘What did you do that for?' said Jay, rubbing his head.

‘That trucker was a Verdan. And those green freaks
want to kill you. I don't understand why. I don't understand anything any more.'

‘But the Cultivars aren't after me now,' protested Jay. ‘I'm dead, aren't I? They think we died in the explosion.'

‘Yeah,' said Dad. ‘That's provided Viridian told them, like he said he would.'

‘Why don't you trust Viridian? He helped us, didn't he?'

‘I don't trust any of those green freaks,' said Dad grimly. ‘So far as I'm concerned it's us against them.'

Soon Dad turned off onto a side road, then another. Then the van was bouncing along a track, its wheels crunching on stones. They crossed hilly scrubland, dotted with gorse bushes and twisted, stunted trees. A misty twilight covered the landscape, making everything grey and blurred.

‘Funny looking hills,' said Jay, just to break the silence. They were conical, with rounded tops, like hills a child would draw.

‘They're not natural hills,' said Dad. ‘They're old slag heaps.'

The van ground its way around them, rocked across a dry stream bed. Then Dad stopped. ‘Here we are.'

They climbed out. The scrubland was silent, a desolate, lonely place, with no people or houses in sight.

In the side of a hill was a rusty iron grill, the size of a garage door. There was a tunnel behind it, big enough for the van to drive through. A sun-bleached sign on the grill said, ‘DANGER! KEEP OUT!'

Jay peered through the grill. Near the entrance, ferns and mosses crowded the tunnel walls. Beyond that was blackness. But from somewhere he could hear water trickling.

‘Hey!' He leapt back as something came streaking out and only just missed his head.

‘A bat,' said Dad. ‘This is an abandoned lead mine. It's full of them. When I was a boy me and my mates used to come here.' Dad chuckled to himself, which made Jay grin with relief. It was like Dad was fighting back at last. Jay was more worried about Dad right then than he was about himself.

‘Yeah,' said Dad. ‘There was a Danger sign there back then. We took no notice of it of course. We went in loads of times, explored every metre of that mine.'

Dad went up and pulled at the grill. It wouldn't move: it was stuck fast in the tunnel entrance. He frowned. ‘This wasn't there back then,' he said. ‘Here, Jay, help me.'

They both yanked at the grill. It wouldn't budge.

‘We can't stay here,' said Jay, gazing round the darkening scrubland. It was suddenly very spooky out there.

Dad threw open the back of the van, rummaged inside. He tossed Jay a coiled towing rope.

‘Here, tie that to the grill,' he said. ‘Make sure it's tight.'

Dad looped the other end round the tow bar on the van. He leapt in and accelerated away. The van wheels skidded on rock as the rope tightened. The grill creaked and shifted.

‘Keep going, Dad!' yelled Jay. ‘It's moving!'

The van wheels screeched and spun wildly, churning up the dirt. The engine revved to a shrieking roar.

Jay thought,
Hope that rope holds. Hope the engine doesn't blow.

Suddenly, the grill came crashing down. The sound echoed across the silent scrubland.

‘Get in the van,' said Dad. He untied the tow rope. ‘Can't see us getting that grill back in place. We'll disguise the entrance somehow. Stick the Danger sign up in front. Even if they
do
think you're dead, we don't want any Cultivar creeps finding out you're not.'

‘How long will we have to hide out?' asked Jay.

‘Until they've forgotten all about you,' said Dad. ‘Or until our food runs out.'

He switched on the lights and drove the van slowly into the mine.

The van lights swept over crystals buried in the tunnel walls and made them glitter like silver.

‘They used to have horses down here,' said Dad, ‘to pull the wagons. We found horse shoes, me and my mates, loads of them, and old picks and sledge hammers.' He switched off the engine. ‘We can't take the van any further.'

Jay got out of the van. The tunnel had opened out into a low chamber. Its walls were lost in darkness. But the headlamp beams lit up great timber posts supporting the roof. They stretched into the distance like the pillars down a cathedral aisle.

‘Wow,' said Jay.

‘This is nothing,' said Dad. ‘You'll be amazed what's down here.'

Jay's foot clunked against something. ‘Hey,' he said, ‘look what I found.' It was a rusty old horse shoe.

‘That's for luck,' said Jay, holding it up in the light.

Jay was lying in the back of the van, spooning cold baked beans out of a can. A lantern with a hand-driven dynamo cast a feeble yellow glow. Jay could have wound it up some more to get a brighter light. But he couldn't be bothered.

He yawned, and asked Dad, ‘How long have we been down here?'

Dad shrugged. At first he'd counted the days but now he wasn't sure. ‘Eight weeks?' he guessed. ‘Couple of months?'

‘It's longer than that!' protested Jay. To him, it felt like forever.

They were living like moles. They weren't entirely without light: they had torches and plenty of batteries, candles and the wind-up lanterns. And during the day some light, along with fresh air, filtered in from outside through the ventilation shafts.

Even so, it was miserably dark, and the air in the mine wasn't good. It smelt of wet rot down here, as if everything was decaying away. Jay was beginning to feel like some subterranean creature.

They were entirely cut off. Viridian had Jay's phone. Dad had never owned a mobile. But mobiles probably wouldn't have worked down here anyway.

Jay jerked his chin up towards the surface. ‘Dad, what do you think is happening up there?'

‘Who knows? Do you want to share some tinned peaches for afters?'

At first, they'd talked a lot about the surface. About whether there were any humans left up there in Franklin or whether the Verdans had totally taken over. About why Jay was Immune and why the Cultivars wanted all Immunes dead. About when it would be safe to leave the mine.

Dad's opinion was: ‘It'll never be safe. But we'll have to take the chance soon. Our food supplies won't last forever.'

‘So what do we do then?' Jay had asked.

‘Go out and get more food. That old shipping container is probably still in one piece. There's lots of food left in there.'

Jay didn't think it was a good idea for Dad to go back, see his precious Silver Bullet a heap of mangled metal. He had suggested, ‘We could ask Viridian for help. He helped us before.' But Dad had got angry, yelling, ‘Why do you trust that green freak so much?'

So, gradually, they'd stopped talking so much about the surface world. As days slipped away the surface began to seem more and more unreal to Jay. As if they'd imagined everything that had happened up there, or it was some dreadful, surreal nightmare they'd shared. They found it
better to drift, switch off their minds, take one day at a time. That way, you didn't go insane.

Once Dad had even said, ‘When we go up, maybe everything will be back to normal. No more green freaks.'

Jay had agreed, ‘Yeah, bet you're right.'

But, even if that somehow miraculously happened, the Silver Bullet would still be in bits. There'd be no family home and no business. That particular dream had gone up in smoke.

Dad just didn't want to face the truth. And down here, it was easy not to.

They'd got a sort of routine to their underground life. They ate, slept a lot, collected water. And they explored the mine. Dad took Jay on journeys of discovery to all the bits of the mine he'd explored as a boy. They'd seen a whole skeleton of some poor pit pony that had died down the mine. They'd seen a cave floor of shiny jet. It had sparkled like black diamonds in their lantern lights.

‘We used to slide on this,' Dad had said, ‘It's slippery as ice.' And he and Jay took off, sliding about in the flickering shadows on their own private underground skating rink, their laughter echoing down the mine's empty shafts and passages.

Jay didn't want to be down the mine. He didn't like the cold, the dark and the damp. Or the rats, whose glowing red eyes you saw as they scuttled past in the dark. But there was a part of him that didn't want this time with Dad to end.

‘Where we going today, Dad?' asked Jay when they'd finished the tinned peaches.

‘This is the best yet,' said Dad. ‘This place I'm taking you to is a massive cave. Hope I can still remember the way.'

They set off from the van, carrying lanterns.

‘You got some food supplies in that backpack?' Dad asked Jay.

Jay nodded. ‘Cans of beans.'

Dad frowned. ‘We're going have to go out for more food soon. Maybe back to the shipping container, like I said.'

‘I brought two torches,' said Jay, mainly to stop Dad's mind drifting from the shipping container to the Silver Bullet. ‘What did you use for light, when you explored down here with your mates?'

When they went far from the mine's entrance on these expeditions, they always carried plenty of light. They didn't want to be lost, in the dark, in the mine's maze of tunnels.

‘Candles,' said Dad. ‘Once, the air was so bad they went out. We had to feel our way back along the walls to the main tunnel. I was totally freaked out! I kept hearing noises and thinking ghosts were coming to get me.'

They turned down a side tunnel. This looked like an even older part of the mine. Some wooden posts were crumbling, eaten away by creeping white fungus. Fungus, unlike Verdans, didn't need light to survive.

The sound of trickling water was growing louder. Dad tilted his head upwards, as if he could see to the surface.

‘There's a lot of water coming down. It must be raining hard up there.'

The next passage was the narrowest they'd been down so far, just a slit in the rock. They had to go down it single file, Jay's knuckles brushing the slimy walls.

‘This wasn't dug out by miners,' said Dad. ‘It's part of an underground cave system.'

Jay wound up his lantern to give extra light. Its rays hardly penetrated the dark.

Dad said, ‘It's not far now.' Then he stopped and said, ‘Listen.'