Doomsday Read online

  At the back of the pack stood a guard I’d seen down here once before, in a vision of this place, destroyed and abandoned. A vision of today.

  ‘The baby,’ Calvin growled. ‘Where is it?’

  I swallowed, remembering the picture Georgia had drawn earlier tonight – Calvin standing out in the bush, Tobias in one hand, a gun in the other – and the ominous words that had come with it: That’s what the baby wanted a picture of.

  The silence stretched out.

  I squeezed Luke’s hand, my mind whirring frantically and coming up with nothing. But if Calvin thought I was going to spend my dying breath selling out my family –

  ‘Answer him!’ snapped one of the guards, losing patience. It was Officer Cook, hands still caked with Soren’s blood.

  Calvin held up a hand, signalling Cook to lower his weapon. ‘Last chance, Jordan. We will find that child one way or another. The only decision you are making here is whether or not you’ll live long enough to see it happen.’

  ‘You sick freak!’ I said, dropping Luke’s hand and striding forward, rage boiling over. ‘How can even you be okay with –?’

  Calvin rushed up, meeting me halfway. He shot out an arm, grabbing me by the throat and shoving me into the wall. ‘Listen,’ he snarled in my ear. ‘Believe me when I tell you, this is not a fight you can –’

  WHAM!

  Calvin was flung into the ceiling – two metres, straight up – crunching with shocking force into one of the light fixtures. I ducked out of the way just in time to avoid getting crushed as he plummeted to the ground again.

  Before he’d even landed, the corridor filled with panicked shouts as all four of Calvin’s men were thrown off their feet, tumbling backwards through the air like they were caught in a hurricane. They crashed to the floor at the end of the corridor in a heap of desks and chairs and limbs.

  Another startled cry and Luke rocketed past me, sliding across the floor. He reached out a hand, somehow managing to catch hold of the bed still lodged partway out of the bedroom door. He dragged himself to a stop and a wild, inhuman scream rang out behind me.

  Peter. Red-faced and rabid, fist clenched with white knuckles around the handle of a knife. The knife.

  For a second, it was like the whole universe had stopped in its tracks.

  Then the guards began to stir.

  Luke scrambled to his feet.

  Calvin felt around for his pistol.

  ‘LEAVE!’ roared Peter, charging. ‘LEAVE HER!’

  Luke dragged me sideways into the surveillance room just as one of the guards opened fire with his rifle. Peter screamed again, and a sick thought flashed through my mind: He can’t kill Luke if they kill him first.

  We raced across the surveillance room, stumbling through the pile of smashed laptops to the door on the other side. But we were only stalling. This was all just a circuit. The surveillance room led through to Kara’s laboratory, which opened into the corridor again through a second door. Nowhere to run but back into the fray.

  We burst through to the lab and I slammed the door behind us. Luke ran to grab one of Kara’s old operating beds and shoved it up against the doorway.

  He took a breath. ‘Now what?’

  Rifle fire split the air in the next room. One of the officers started shouting, but it was swallowed up in a scream and a smash and dull thud.

  ‘We need to keep going,’ I said, lunging across the lab. ‘Find the others.’

  Luke cringed. ‘Yeah, but …’

  ‘We can’t stay here,’ I said. ‘And we’ll come out right up the other end of the corridor from where we started. We might be able to sneak –’

  SMASH!

  A massive crack appeared in the door we’d just blocked off as something – or someone – heavy was hurled into it. The bed Luke had shoved back there rattled away across the floor.

  ‘GET OUT!’ cried Peter, voice breaking. ‘YOU DON’T GO NEAR HER!’

  ‘Quick,’ I said, already at the second door, peering into the corridor.

  I could only see one guy out there. Only one still on his feet, anyway. Officer Blake or something, the one from my vision. He was staring into the surveillance room, weapon halfway raised, like he knew what he was supposed to be doing but didn’t want to risk catching Peter’s attention.

  I heard Peter scream, and Blake reeled away in fright. I looked across the lab just in time to see the first door splinter apart and the limp form of a security guard come sailing through the air towards us. The body thudded to the ground and rolled to a stop against the wall.

  Luke shoved me into the corridor.

  Officer Blake twitched around, spotting us. He raised his rifle and fired. Too late. Mouldy plaster exploded from the wall behind us, but we were already through the door at the end of the corridor and out into the dark, debris-strewn passageway that wound through the bowels of the Vattel Complex.

  After only a couple of seconds, I heard pounding footsteps, and a pair of torches tore up the corridor behind us. But here, at least, we had the home-ground advantage. We sprinted along on autopilot, ducking and weaving instinctively to avoid the countless bits of jagged, rusting shrapnel spiking out from the walls and ceiling – the familiar hazards of a place that had been blown up and concreted over and dug back out of the rubble again. I heard one of the guards cry out, swearing bitterly as he collided with something sharp.

  Ahead of us, I spotted the place where the passageway widened out, leading off to the room where we’d been holding Peter. Still no sign of Mum or Georgia. Good.

  I pushed forward, and almost tripped over a small, dark shape in the middle of our path. I leapt over it, glancing back at Luke. ‘Watch out –’

  ‘Argh!’ Luke stumbled, kicking the thing over. It toppled onto its side and I realised it was some kind of gas canister. There was a bit of string tied to it, leading off down the passageway.

  We kept moving and the string changed course, running in under the door to Peter’s room. Suspicion flared inside of me and I shoved the door open, ignoring Luke’s moan of protest.

  Inside, Soren was crouched behind Peter’s broken bed, holding an old lighter to the end of the string.

  ‘Come on!’ he barked at us, bloodied fingers twitching on the lighter. ‘Come on! Come on! Come on!’

  There was a spitting, crackling sound, and a spark ignited at the end of the string. It shot along the fuse, way faster than I’d expected, across the floor and out into the passageway.

  ‘Close the door!’ Soren shouted. ‘Close it!’

  I heaved the door shut and dived behind the bed, dragging Luke –

  BOOM!

  The whole world flashed bright orange and I rushed to shield my head as the bed was blown back into us. A cloud of dust and smoke rushed into the room, swirling into my nose and mouth, and I curled up on the concrete, coughing violently.

  Everything was black, the lights above our heads destroyed by the explosion. Finally I could breathe again, and I sat up.

  Luke’s hand came down on my arm, groping in the darkness. ‘You okay?’

  ‘Yeah.’ I dragged myself to my feet. ‘Soren?’

  A torch flashed on beside me and I saw Soren’s battered face suspended in a haze of grey dust. He stood, grunting, and stepped over the bed. I helped Luke up and we followed him back into the passageway.

  Soren swung the torch back the way we’d come. But instead of lighting up the empty corridor, the beam shot straight into a sprawling heap of concrete boulders. An entire wall of rubble that hadn’t been there two minutes ago.

  He let out another grunt. ‘There is your barricade.’

  THURSDAY, AUGUST 13, 12.21 A.M. 16 HOURS, 39 MINUTES

  ‘I hope they kill each other,’ Soren growled, wincing in pain as I half-supported, half-dragged him up the passageway. ‘Peter and Calvin. Solve both our problems.’

  ‘Hurry up,’ I said, shoving him along. Jordan was pulling ahead of us, flashing Soren’s torch around at the walls. The passageway
was starting to smooth out again by now, the debris clearing as we moved further away from the centre of the explosion that had ripped through the place two decades ago.

  A shadow slid across the wall and I flinched.

  Just the torch.

  Surely there was no way Peter could have made it through before the cave-in. But that didn’t stop me seeing him around every corner. Didn’t stop my mind skittering between hair-trigger panic at the thought of him leaping out at me and a cold, creeping dread at what would happen when he finally did.

  Jordan stopped at a row of lockers along the righthand wall. She pulled open the door of the last locker in line, and a scream exploded from inside. Two hands shot out, clutching a pistol.

  Jordan leapt back. ‘Whoa! No! It’s okay! It’s us!’

  The hands hovered in the air, still pointed straight at Jordan’s chest, then finally dropped down again. My mum stepped shakily out of the locker. ‘Sorry. Sorry, I was …’

  ‘It’s fine,’ said Jordan. ‘Quick, get back inside.’

  Mum ducked back in and we followed after her. Straight through the locker and out the back, into the room hidden on the other side.

  Jordan and I had set this up weeks ago. The lockers had originally been inside the room, but we’d dragged them out into the hall and punched the back out of this one. We had food in here for a day or two, and a couple of blankets to shield us against the worst of the cold. Not exactly Narnia, but it would keep us alive until the end of the world, at least.

  ‘Where are they?’ Mum asked, returning to her guard duty. There was something so horrible about the sight of her holding a gun that I wished I’d never given it to her.

  ‘Back up near Peter’s room,’ I said. ‘Soren rigged up an explosion and caved in the passageway.’

  ‘So we’re trapped,’ said Cathryn, stepping out of the shadows.

  ‘You were already trapped,’ said Soren, limping in behind us.

  Jordan spun her torch around the little room and practically dived on top of her mum, who was over in the corner feeding the baby. Georgia was curled up next to her, sniffling. I looked away, not exactly clear on the breastfeeding privacy rules.

  ‘So what do we do now?’ Mum asked.

  ‘Um,’ I said, still a little thrown by this bizarre new world where Mum turned to me for instructions. ‘Let’s just sit tight for a while. Keep hidden. I mean, with everything going on in town, they might eventually decide to just give up on us.’

  Mum pursed her lips, seeing straight through me. But what else was I meant to tell her? She didn’t know about Peter. Not the part about him stabbing me to death, anyway. And there wasn’t much point dumping that on her now.

  ‘How is he?’ whispered Jordan, drawing my attention back to the family reunion on the floor. She brushed a gentle finger over Tobias’s head.

  Mrs Burke shrugged. ‘He seems fine so far. Normal. I mean, he’s feeding like a super baby, but so did you and Georgia.’

  Jordan shot me a sideways glance. End of the world or not, it’s never okay for your mum to start discussing your ‘feeding’ habits in public.

  Her eyes drifted back to Tobias, and mine followed, the same question running through both our heads:

  How in the world was this tiny kid supposed to stop a killer virus from exterminating seven billion people? Somehow, that seemed even more impossible than the rest of Phoenix’s cavalcade of insanity.

  And what if it really was impossible? What if Tobias wasn’t the saviour we all thought he was?

  The only reason any of us believed Tobias was special was that I’d said he was, twenty years ago. But what did I know? What if this was all just some stupid endless loop of me fooling myself into believing something that had never been true in the first place?

  Stop, I thought fiercely. Stop it. You’re not getting out of it that way.

  This wasn’t about my doubts and I knew it.

  This was about fear.

  I knew what the right thing was. I knew I couldn’t just ignore humanity’s best chance for survival. And with a day left until the end, I knew I was dead whether I confronted Peter or not.

  Which was all good and rational, but there’s a pretty massive difference between knowing what’s right and actually having the guts to do it.

  All these weeks, I’d been wishing for a clear way forward. A tangible answer that I could pick up and run with. Now I had it. Or as close as I’d ever get, anyway.

  And all I wanted to do was run the other way.

  I sat on the ground, back against the cold wall. Stalling.

  We’d been down here for what felt like days now, but was probably more like half an hour. Somewhere in that time, Jordan had remembered the phone in her pocket, the one I’d pulled from Ketterley’s body earlier tonight. We’d crowded around as she tried to call Reeve, but we were way too deep underground to get reception, even on Shackleton’s secret supervillains’ network.

  Jordan had pocketed the phone again and no-one had spoken since. Cathryn was sobbing in one corner, Soren sitting silently in another, picking at a scab. Mrs Burke was doing her best to keep Georgia from freaking out, but even a normal six-year-old wouldn’t have missed the despair in the room, let alone a kid who could see inside other people’s minds.

  Mum hadn’t left her place at the door for a moment. Not even when the rest of us were fixated on the phone.

  And through it all, Tobias just lay there, sleeping. No sign in the world that he was anything other than an ordinary newborn.

  But he had to be. He was all we had left.

  Which meant I had a job to do.

  I stared down at Tobias, so impossibly tiny and frail. Just a baby.

  You’ d better be worth it.

  Jordan was circling the room, pacing like a caged animal. I reached for her leg as she passed. She dropped down next to me, knees bent up against her chest.

  ‘Hey,’ I whispered. I put an arm around her and the dull ache in my stomach intensified. Not that we’d ever had great odds of surviving this place and living happily ever after, but it’s one thing to see something coming a mile away, and another thing to be there when it arrives.

  Jordan leant into me. ‘This is stupid,’ she breathed. ‘We need to do something.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said.

  But for a minute, I couldn’t get the words out. I just sat there, feeling her next to me, knowing it was probably the last time we were ever going to be together like this.

  ‘We have to go back,’ I said finally, keeping my voice low enough that only she could hear. ‘I have to go back. I need to deliver that message to Kara.’

  Jordan straightened up.

  ‘Don’t,’ I said. ‘Please. Don’t argue about it. It’s hard enough –’

  ‘So, what, I’m supposed to just stand back and watch you die?’ she hissed.

  ‘We need to know, Jordan! If Tobias is the answer to all of this, then we need to make sure we know about it. And if he’s not – Well, I’m dead anyway, aren’t I? As soon as Tabitha gets out, I’m gone. And in the meantime,’ I said, with way more courage than I felt, getting up before either of us had the chance to talk me out of it, ‘I can’t just sit here. And I’m pretty sure you can’t either.’

  Jordan got up after me, and Mrs Burke jolted. ‘What’s going on? Did you hear something?’

  ‘No, it’s okay,’ I said. ‘We’re just going to duck outside for a sec. See how far along they are, clearing through the rubble.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea,’ said Mrs Burke tersely.

  Jordan glared at me, and there was an uncomfortable silence as she decided whether or not to play along.

  ‘We’ll be careful,’ she said finally, bending down to hug her mum. ‘Whatever happens, stay quiet and don’t give yourselves away.’

  Jordan scooped Soren’s torch up off the ground. Georgia buried her face in her mum’s side.

  ‘Back soon,’ I lied, heading for the door.

  And suddenly, I gu
ess my survival instinct kicked in or something, because every step became a massive effort, an order I had to force my body to carry out against its will.

  After weeks of turning this moment over and over in my head, I was finally stepping out to meet it. It wasn’t just an idea anymore – some weird, unexplainable thing we’d seen on an old video tape. It was actually going to happen.

  Mum turned as I reached her, face barely visible in the darkness. She held out the pistol. ‘Take this.’

  I shook my head. ‘We’ll be fine. You need to protect the others.’

  Mum hesitated, then lowered the gun. She put her arms around me and I almost lost it.

  I’d walked into the jaws of death before, but not like this. Not with the outcome already decided and played out and caught on camera before I’d even started. Not knowing that I wasn’t coming back.

  I kept hold of Mum, a crushing hollowness flooding through my chest, like I was being pushed apart from the inside. I let the moment drag out as long as I could, knowing that this was it, that letting go meant letting go.

  Mum made a noise in my ear. The sound was so unfamiliar, so out-of-character for her, that it took me a second to realise she was crying.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, voice cracking. ‘I’m sorry I brought you here. I’m sorry I dragged you into all this. If I’d just looked up from my work for a half a second and stopped to think what you might be –’

  ‘Mum, stop,’ I said, taking a breath to keep back my own tears. ‘No-one knew what this place was! That was the whole point. And, listen, whatever happens to me – whatever happens to any of us –’

  ‘Luke …’

  ‘No, listen,’ I said, determined to get it out while I still could. ‘You need to know I don’t blame you, okay? Whatever happens to me, I need you to know that none of this is your fault.’

  Mum held me out at arm’s length. ‘Luke, why are you –?’

  ‘Because it’s the end of the world, Mum.’ I took another steadying breath, thankful she wouldn’t be able to make out my face in the darkness.

  She pulled me to her again. ‘Be safe out there, okay?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, wrenching myself away from her.