Doomsday Read online

  To Mum and Dad,

  For more reasons than I could possibly list here.

  Thank you.

  Contents

  Chapter 1 Luke

  Chapter 2 Jordan

  Chapter 3 Luke

  Chapter 4 Luke

  Chapter 5 Jordan

  Chapter 6 Jordan

  Chapter 7 Peter

  Chapter 8 Jordan

  Chapter 9 Bill

  Chapter 10 Bill

  Chapter 11 Bill

  Chapter 12 Bill

  Chapter 13 Luke

  Chapter 14 Jordan

  Chapter 15 Luke

  Chapter 16 Jordan

  Chapter 17 Luke

  Chapter 18 Luke

  Chapter 19 Jordan

  Chapter 20 Luke

  Chapter 21 Luke

  Chapter 22 Jordan

  Chapter 23 Luke

  Chapter 24 Jordan

  Chapter 25 Luke

  Chapter 26 Luke

  Chapter 27 Luke

  Chapter 28 Jordan

  Chapter 29 Jordan

  Chapter 30 Luke

  Chapter 31 Jordan

  Chapter 32 Luke

  Chapter 33 Jordan

  Chapter 34 Jordan

  Chapter 35 Jordan

  Chapter 36 Luke

  Chapter 37 Luke

  Chapter 38 Jordan

  Chapter 39 Jordan

  Chapter 40 Luke

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright Page

  THURSDAY, AUGUST 13, 12.02 A.M. 16 HOURS, 58 MINUTES

  We ran.

  Torches swept through the bush behind us, closer every second. Soren wailed in pain as Jordan and I dragged him through the mud.

  ‘Quiet!’ hissed Jordan, steering us back towards the entrance to the Vattel Complex, but Soren kept right on shrieking. He writhed under my grip, swollen, bruised, slick with the blood from his interrogation.

  A torch beam sliced past us and I caught a flash of Jordan’s face, stretched tight with anger. She shot a dark look at Soren, like she was half-tempted to throw him to the guards and be done with it.

  ‘No!’ Soren gasped, losing his footing. ‘Please – I did not mean to –!’

  He broke off into another wail as Jordan jostled him again. ‘You didn’t mean to?’

  We’d thought Soren was dead. We’d seen him get gunned down, back in town. But apparently he hadn’t been gunned down enough to keep him from selling the rest of us out to Shackleton.

  I looked back, stomach churning. At least five guards were crashing through the undergrowth behind us, and there was no mistaking the towering silhouette of the guy up front. Calvin. Back on duty after weeks out of action, just in time to ring in the end of the world.

  The sky above our heads crackled with electricity. Moments before Soren’s arrival, Shackleton had unleashed the final part of his plan to keep Phoenix locked off from the outside world: a domed network of electrified cables, stretching out over the town like an enormous spiderweb. I couldn’t see it anymore – after one brilliant flash as it powered up, the shield grid had faded into the darkness – but I could still hear it. I could still feel it pressing down on us.

  Smoke billowed up from the south, blotting out the stars as the fire in town continued to blaze. Reeve and the others were still back there, fighting for control of the Shackleton Building. But they couldn’t be doing much better than us if Shackleton had security guys to spare for a search party.

  We reached the entrance to the Complex and someone inside opened the trapdoor to let us in.

  ‘Stop! Stop!’ Soren demanded, digging his heels into the dirt, like he’d only just realised where we were taking him. ‘We have to get away from here!’

  I ignored him, hitting the stairs as soon as the gap was wide enough, my feet sliding on the mouldy concrete. I wasn’t about to just abandon Mum and the others.

  ‘Run!’ he railed on. ‘Leave them! There is no time!’

  ‘You want to stay out here?’ Jordan snapped, releasing her grip on him. ‘Fine. Stay.’

  Soren swayed, almost collapsing, and latched onto Jordan again.

  There was a shout from the bush, way too close, and I swore as another torch beam caught me in the face. I turned and hammered down the stairs, bracing for an explosion of gunfire, but it never came, and a few steps later I heard the entrance rolling shut above our heads.

  ‘We need to get the others into the panic room,’ said Jordan. ‘Barricade the corridor. Hold Calvin off.’

  My head swam. ‘Jordan, how are we meant to –?’

  ‘You’ve killed us!’ Soren wailed. ‘You’ve killed us! There is no way out!’

  Jordan didn’t want to hear it. She tore down the stairs, three at a time, hauling Soren behind her.

  I staggered down after them, feet heavier with every step. It wouldn’t take Calvin five minutes to get through that trapdoor. And in the meantime, I knew the Co-operative weren’t the only ones who wanted me dead.

  He was down here somewhere. Peter. Out of his room and hours away from putting a knife in my chest.

  Earlier tonight, Crazy Bill had dragged Jordan and me down into the depths of this place, to the half-buried lab he’d finally finished excavating out of the concrete. He’d cornered us, watching with wild excitement as Jordan’s body began fading out of existence, into one of her ‘visions’ of another time.

  Almost like he’d known it was coming.

  As always, I’d grabbed onto Jordan, fighting to stabilise her, to drag her out of the vision and back into the present before she disappeared completely. But this time, things had spun even further out of control than usual.

  For a moment before she returned, Jordan had somehow got caught between the two timelines; one foot in the present and the other in wherever she’d been fading away to. She’d become a kind of gateway between our time and the other one. And in that moment, Bill had run at her – run through her – and disappeared. Into the other time.

  A minute later, he’d returned. And suddenly, Crazy Bill wasn’t so crazy anymore. Somehow, his trip through Jordan, through time, had cleared his head enough for him to tell us the truth about who he really was.

  Bill was Peter. A twenty-years-older Peter who’d spent the last two decades trapped in the past. Because this wasn’t the first time he’d used Jordan as a time machine.

  Sometime in the next seventeen hours – in Bill’s past, and our future – Jordan was going to fade out again. And when she did, she’d become a gateway between our time and another: a day twenty years ago. One we’d seen replayed over and over again on Kara and Soren’s old surveillance video.

  The day of my murder.

  I was going to go back in time, armed with a message that just might help us save the world. And Peter – our Peter – was going to follow me back. He was going to kill me. And then he was going to dive back through the gateway, back to the present.

  But he was going to be too slow. The gateway was going to collapse, spitting him out, stranding him in the past with no way back to the present except to wait out the next two decades until it all happened again. And the next time Peter showed his face in Phoenix, it would be as a mentally unstable homeless man who seemed to know a bit too much about what the Shackleton Co-operative was up to. Which was all very tragic and whatever, but given the part of the story where he stabbed me to death, I wasn’t shedding any tears for him.

  And I was going to die. I got that now. If there’d been any hope left that I could escape all this alive, it had disappeared the moment that trapdoor had closed over our heads.

  Bill was right: there was no undoing the past. This wasn’t just going to happen. It had already happened. More than that, it had to happen. The only reason we had any clue how to stop Tabitha eating humanity alive from th
e inside out was this: I’d gone back to the past the first time round and delivered our message to Kara.

  Take Tobias to the release station.

  That was it. Everything we had. A one-sentence save-the-world plan based on –

  Based on what?

  I stumbled down the last few stairs. Sick. Emptied out. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to just let it all go. Curl up into a ball right here on the stairs and wait for the end to come. But some stubborn corner of my mind kept me stumbling forward. If I had to die, I was going to make it count for something.

  It was chaos in the corridor. Mum raced to meet us at the bottom of the stairs, an appalled look on her face at the sight of Soren’s mangled body. Cathryn stood behind her, sobbing violently, still bleeding from the gashes Peter had scratched into her face on the way out of his cell. Jordan’s mum was leaning against the doorway to the surveillance room – on her feet, which was something – with a screaming Georgia clinging to one leg and a minutes-old baby cradled in her arms.

  Tobias.

  The annihilation of the human race was scheduled for five o’clock this afternoon, and the weight of the world was resting on someone who couldn’t even support the weight of his own head.

  Mum opened her mouth to speak, but Jordan immediately shouted her down. ‘RUN!’

  ‘What’s happening?’ Georgia wailed, burying her face in her mum’s leg.

  ‘They’re coming! They’re already at the entrance! All of you, get down into the panic room!’ Jordan dragged Soren over to Cathryn, dumping him in her arms. ‘Take him.’

  Cathryn shook her head. ‘I don’t –’

  ‘Take him!’

  ‘Where’s Peter?’ I asked, grabbing hold of Mum.

  ‘I don’t know. We heard noise in the kitchen, but –’

  ‘GO!’ Jordan screamed. ‘GO, GO, GO! NOW!’

  They got moving, Soren limping against Cathryn, Mrs Burke dragging Georgia along with one hand, clutching Tobias in the other. I waited for Mum to fall in behind them, then moved to follow.

  I’d only taken two steps before I realised Jordan wasn’t with us. She’d run off into the surveillance room. I doubled back, stomach sinking even lower.

  ‘No!’ said Mum, shooting out a hand to grab me. ‘Luke, you’re not –’

  ‘Right behind you,’ I said. I reached into the back of my jeans and pulled out the pistol I’d picked up on our trip to the Shackleton Building earlier that night. ‘Here.’

  Her eyes went wide. ‘Luke, no, I wouldn’t even know what to –!’

  She twisted around at a sudden moan and a splattering sound behind her. Cathryn let out a nauseated shriek. Soren had just thrown up all over the ground.

  ‘Please,’ I said, pressing the gun into Mum’s hand. ‘They need you.’

  She sucked in a shuddering breath and took the pistol, holding it away from her like she was afraid it might spontaneously combust. ‘All – all right. But …’

  She pulled me into a hug, then ran off to get the others moving again.

  I raced to the surveillance room. Static spat from the circle of laptops that had once fed us footage from the cameras in town, back before Mike blew up the security centre. I glanced around the room, half-expecting Peter to come bursting out from under one of the desks.

  Jordan was across the room, staring at our one remaining eye on the outside: the camera feed from the entrance above our heads. Then she dashed past me, taking hold of a desk near the door.

  ‘He’s up there,’ she said, voice hard, eyes red with tears. ‘Calvin. They’re all around the entrance. But I can’t –’

  Smash!

  Jordan lifted up the desk, upending it, knocking a pair of laptops to the floor. ‘– I can’t see what they’re doing. Too dark.’ She ran the desk out into the corridor.

  I followed her out. ‘Jordan, what are we –?’

  There was another echoing crash as she threw the desk to the ground, ramming it between the walls of the corridor.

  ‘Come on,’ she grunted, almost knocking me over as she ran to grab another desk.

  A barricade. Or at least, an attempted barricade. Pointless. No way was this going to stop them, or even hold them up for more than a minute or two.

  But there was a glint in Jordan’s eye that told me this was not a good time to argue. Her family was in danger. We were way past reason now.

  I ducked back into the surveillance room, upending another desk, hands barely keeping their grip on it. Maybe Peter wasn’t going to finish me off after all.

  Maybe it wouldn’t even get that far.

  A few more desks, and we’d made a heap that stretched to the ceiling. But it would take just one solid push to send the whole thing crashing to the ground.

  Jordan stayed at the barricade, trying to wedge the desks more tightly together, while I sprinted back to the surveillance room for some chairs to shove into the gaps. I returned just in time to see Jordan lose her grip on the desk at the top of the pile, sending it clattering to the ground on the other side. She screamed in frustration, pounding her fist against the wall.

  I tried again. ‘Jordan –’

  ‘Pass me that chair,’ she snapped, wrenching it out of my hands. She jammed it between two of the desks, and the whole pile shifted, almost collapsing.

  ‘Jordan, listen, I don’t think this is –’

  She wheeled around, face twisted in desperation. ‘They’re not getting in here, Luke!’

  ‘Yes they are!’ I said. ‘You know they are! You’ve seen it! You want to help your family, we need to get down to the panic room and keep Calvin out of there!’

  She twisted away from me, sprinting down the corridor. I ran to catch up, relieved that she was actually listening to me. But then –

  ‘Beds,’ she said frantically, veering through another doorway. ‘They’ll be harder to move.’

  ‘Jordan, stop, they won’t even –’

  I froze at the door, catching sight of the mess spilling out from the kitchen at the end of the bedroom. It had been completely ransacked. Drawers yanked open, cupboard doors ripped from their hinges, ground littered with the smashed remains of mugs and bowls and –

  And cutlery.

  Knives.

  This was Peter’s work. He’d found his murder weapon.

  I shivered, creeping into the kitchen to investigate, and almost jumped out of my skin at a loud scraping behind me. Jordan, shoving a bed at the door. There was a clatter of rusty metal as it slammed into the doorway and got stuck. She dragged the end around, throwing her weight against it. The bed shifted a few centimetres and got lodged again. She cried out, rattling the bed with both hands, panic threatening to swallow her completely.

  I came up behind her, resting my hands on her shoulders. ‘Look –’

  ‘Would you help me with this?’

  ‘Look,’ I said again, pointing at the mess in the kitchen.

  Jordan’s eyes dropped to the floor, taking it all in for the first time. I felt her shoulders slump, and some of the manic energy seemed to drain out of her.

  ‘Please,’ I said. ‘Please, can we just get out of here?’

  Jordan turned around, cheeks still glistening with tears, an agonised look on her face.

  ‘C’mon,’ I said, moving to drag the bed back out of our way.

  My hands had barely hit the bed frame when an explosion rang out above our heads, echoing down the stairs. Then a distant shout and the sound of thundering footsteps.

  They were here.

  THURSDAY, AUGUST 13, 12.09 A.M. 16 HOURS, 51 MINUTES

  ‘Crap!’ Luke heaved at the bed, but it was stuck fast. He gave up, vaulting over, nearly slipping as his foot skidded in the puddle of vomit on the ground.

  I leapt out behind him, finally dragging my head back into the game, hurling silent abuse at myself for letting the panic take over like that.

  What was I thinking? What was I thinking, wasting time on that joke of a barricade when I could have b
een getting Mum and Georgia to safety?

  And Tobias.

  Tobias.

  My baby brother, who hadn’t even been alive long enough to see a sunrise, but who was somehow meant to be the answer to all of this.

  If we could even get him out of here alive.

  We pounded down the corridor. I could hear voices approaching from the other side of the barricade. They were already –

  Crash!

  The barricade collapsed, my misguided attempt at protecting my family exploding in a pitiful avalanche of furniture. I ducked, screaming, as someone opened fire on us.

  BLAM! BLAM!

  A fluorescent tube fell from the ceiling, shattering on the floor at our feet.

  ‘Freeze!’ Calvin boomed.

  But I’d already stopped running. Calvin didn’t miss that shot. Not from ten metres away in an empty corridor. It had been a warning. That was the only reason we were still alive.

  ‘Turn around,’ he ordered.

  I turned, heart hammering, but keeping my head up, forcing myself to look at him.

  Calvin waded through the mess of upended furniture, flanked by four guards, all armed with Shackleton’s standard-issue assault rifles. Whatever had been keeping him out of action these past few weeks, he’d clearly gotten over it.

  Luke slid a hand into mine. He was shaking like crazy, and I felt a throb of guilt for keeping him up here when he could have been finding a place to hide.

  One of the guards let out a snicker.

  Something flashed behind Calvin’s eyes. Just one tiny, fleeting moment, and then gone again. He kicked aside the last chair in his path and paused a few metres short of us, sneering at our filthy nest of a hideout, probably wondering how on earth we’d kept it a secret all this time.

  He raised a red-gloved hand, aiming his pistol again.

  ‘Where is it?’

  Neither of us spoke.

  I clenched my teeth, blinking the tears out of my eyes, stomach roiling. It couldn’t end like this. It couldn’t. What was the point of finally figuring out Tobias if we were going to die before it even had a chance to matter?

  Calvin’s men stood poised behind him, waiting for an order. I’d run into all of them before at one time or another. Seasoned officers who Calvin could trust to stay loyal and get the job done.