20 Years Later (36 page)

Titus saw the arch of the ceiling, the smoothness of the walls and a snippet of the dream he'd had about Lyssa when she had been a prisoner down here returned to him. He took a deep breath, pushing the memory away to focus on the silent corridor and its looming shadows instead.

Zane woke as if leaping out of a fire, muscles straining and heart racing. He was sitting up before he registered where he was or what was happening.

By the time he had the wherewithal to look around the room, he realised that something had scraped his arm at the elbow and that a substance had been forced into his veins. He just knew it, just like he knew he was drawing breath.

He had to squint; a bright light was shining in his eyes, then it moved away. He realised that the room he was in was dark, but that one of the people from the Unders was in the room with him, holding a torch. He could hear them drawing on the oxygen tank. In. Out. In. Out. He couldn't understand how he could feel so alert and yet so exhausted all at once. His disorientation began to fade and he realised he was sitting on something soft, a bed like Eve's.

“I didn't want to wake you that way.” He recognised the voice; it was the gang leader. “It was a necessity. You may feel rather strange, it was adrenaline and caffeine and a few other stimulants. I need you to be awake.”

Zane blinked at the floating disc of torchlight, unable to see much of the man in the darkness. “Why? What's going on?”

“It's finished, you see. And I need to tell you what you are inheriting.”

“What has finished? What does inheriting mean?”

A sigh and then the scrape of a chair. The torch was placed on the floor, illuminating more of the man as he perched on it whilst casting strange shadows onto the featureless walls.

“Hex is finished. The people up above have cut the power supply, undoubtedly with help from someone inside. The auxiliary power supply and back-up system have failed too.”

“No!” Zane cried out and slammed his hands down on the bed. “No, no! I tried to stop it! I wanted to stop it!”

“Shhh,” the man said softly. “There's been enough screaming and crying and begging and regrets. Let's be civilised at least for these last precious minutes.” He waited until Zane sat back again. “Good. What's your name?”

The question seemed so normal and yet so unusual in the context that it took a moment for Zane to answer him.

“Unusual name,” he commented. “My name is Lieutenant Colonel Roper. Or Doctor Roper, if that is easier, as that's also true.”

Zane did nothing to disguise his repulsion. “You're a doctor? Haven't
any
of Hex's doctors taken the oath?”

Roper frowned briefly, then made the connection. “Oh, that oath. Yes,” he chuckled bitterly. “All of us did, in our idealistic youth.”

“Then how could you kill her?!” Zane yelled, his response exaggerated by the drugs coursing through him.

Another sigh. “Necessity. I had to know what you could do after seeing your remarkable feat with the cut. Killing one more makes so little difference.”

“One more … how many people have you killed?”

He looked up at Zane, his features shadowed by the angle of the torch, making his eyes look like empty sockets. “All of them. All of the people that died from the virus. I made it, you see. I made it, I released it, and I killed them all. After one has killed several billion people, one more is barely noticeable.”

Zane felt sick. His body felt unreal, all of it felt unreal. He pushed himself down the gurney until his back hit the wall, as far away from Roper as he could put himself.

“Don't you want to know why?” Roper asked after letting Zane's silence hang. Zane didn't reply, couldn't reply; his mind couldn't find the words for him to articulate all of the things he felt at once, all of the questions bombarding him.

“Strange,” Roper sighed, “I never thought I would tell anyone. I never felt the need, never saw the point really. But here I am, using the last of my air, confessing to a boy I don't even know.”

“Don't you feel guilty?” Zane finally managed, his curiosity finally surfacing, like a Bloomsbury Boy compelled to poke at a dead rat.

“No,” Roper said flatly. “No, I really don't feel an ounce of guilt. Nor regret.” He paused, as if waiting to see if an emotion was going to bubble up within. “Perhaps a slight sense of disappointment,” he finally concluded.

“But … but why did you want to kill everyone?!” Zane asked, barely able to conceive of such an act.

“Oh, I didn't,” Roper replied. “Only some. The blacks, the Arabs. Only them.” His mouth twisted. “Foreign filth.”

Zane struggled to comprehend what he meant. “Do you mean the people who had different coloured skin?”

“Yes,” Roper said. “I created a very selective virus. Only meant to kill certain races. It was very elegant and worked beautifully for a few weeks. Excellent transmission rate, very swift.”

Zane swallowed down the bile that had risen in his throat. “How can you talk like that?” he whispered. “Like you made something beautiful?”

“But I did,” Roper replied quickly. “It was beautiful. A beautiful, elegant solution to all of our society's problems.”

“How can killing people be beautiful?”

“You can't possibly understand,” Roper muttered sadly. “You weren't alive then–you don't know what it was like, what they were doing to our country!” His hand balled into a fist and he leant forward, swept up in the first emotional reaction that Zane had seen. “Something had to be done! The government was pathetic, too obsessed with political correctness. Then the terrorism started, the wars … but I knew what I had to do. I created Hex, started it off as a government project.” He guffawed. “And they paid for it out of taxpayers' money without the faintest idea! They just trusted me, and they were so damn afraid they didn't stop to think what else Hex could be used for. A bunker to protect against terrorism one day, an island of civilisation the next. Hah!”

Zane pressed himself against the wall as Roper ranted, not fully understanding everything he said. He didn't know the meaning of words such as terrorism, government, or taxpayers.

The speech ended and Roper came back to himself, looked back at Zane. “You couldn't possibly understand.” He sighed again. “It mutated. The virus. Began to kill other people, ones I didn't intend to remove. And do you know why?!” He stood, jabbed a finger towards Zane. “Because they had bred!” he shouted. “Because they had spawned half breeds and it ruined everything. The virus crossed over to the pure race because of them, damn them!”

Zane slid himself into the corner, the bed shaking beneath him. He said nothing, waiting for the outburst to pass, hoping desperately to get out of this room alive.

Roper calmed himself. “I'm sorry,” he said finally, seating himself down once more. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean to shout.”

An awkward moment passed, until he said: “That's your inheritance, young man.” Seeing the boy's confusion, he continued. “What I leave behind to you. An imperfect world. I've spent all these years trying to find a cure to what my creation had become, but it seems that the savages on the surface finally won. At least they're white. Such a pity you didn't come to us sooner. I think you may have been the key to the cure. You almost saved her, almost.”

Zane shook, with rage, with exhaustion, with fear. “You never should've done that! You're not a real doctor!”

“And what exactly is a
real
doctor?” Roper scoffed. “What do you know about doctors?!”

“I know about the Hippocratic oath!” Zane yelled back, jumping off the bed to stand in front of the man. “I know that doctors swear to do everything they can to keep people alive, not kill them!”

“Who told you that?” Roper smirked, amused at the young man's zeal. “One of the savages up there?”

“No!” Zane retorted. “I found out myself, and I took that oath, so I know what it means! You broke it, not just with Radley, but millions of times over! You're the worst, the most … the most …”

Roper stopped smirking, studied Zane's conviction, watched him struggle to express his hatred. “You really took that oath. You really believe in it, don't you?”

“Yes,” Zane replied, holding his hands up to his temples to try to ease the pressure in his pounding head.

“You swore to always save a life?”

“Yes, always.”

Roper smiled coldly. “Then if you value saving a person's life above all else, save mine.”

“Did you hear that?”

At Titus' whisper, the group stopped, immediately switching off the clockwork torches they had collected en route. All strained to listen above their own heartbeats, the pitch blackness of the tunnel seeming to close in around them.

“Don't 'ear nothin',” Jay finally said. “What did it sound like?”

“Someone crying,” Titus whispered back.

All that could be heard was the slight creaking of Luthor and Erin's bows as they pulled them taut, ready to fire at the first sign of anyone approaching.

Titus drew in a deep breath, focused. He was certain there had been something. In his stillness he realised that it hadn't been a sound he'd detected, but that sense of Other, of a person nearby who hadn't needed to make a noise for him to sense them. Without hearing them, he knew they were crying. Without seeing them, he knew they were cowering in some kind of nook, with a weapon in their hand, waiting for them.

He switched on his torch and shone the white beam back up the tunnel to a spot where it had forked. “I heard it again,” he lied. “Back that way.”

“But the children are this way,” Shannon urged. “There's nothing back there, no-one to find.”

Titus shook his head. “I know it.” He started to trudge back down the tunnel, Erin falling in alongside him with no hesitation.

Jay shrugged at Shannon and jerked a thumb in Titus' direction. “We'd better stick together,” he muttered to the doctor.

“I don't know what's in that spoke,” Shannon replied as the group fell in behind Titus and Erin. “They never let me in there.”

“Shhh,” Titus urged and they progressed in silence.

Only a couple of minutes past the fork, through several sets of unsealed doors, the tunnel changed from one with featureless walls into one with doorways set at regular intervals. No keypads or clipboards were fixed next to them, but name plates were set into them, made of smooth white plastic.

Catherine, Monica, Mary. Titus read the names written onto them as he passed, growing more uneasy with each step. He felt his chest tighten as the tension of the person he felt began to leech into him. Then he realised that it wasn't just one, but several different patterns of emotional registers that were pressing in on him. Even though they felt distinct from one another, all of those minds shared the same terrified mental state. Taking another long, deep breath, he consciously drew a mental curtain around himself, thinking hard about where he ended and they began.

He stopped outside of a door with a plaque that read “Day Room.” He pointed at it. “There's someone in there,” he whispered. “More than one I think.”

Luthor pointed a position out to Erin using the notched arrow and she stepped into place. Jay readied himself as they did this, holding his hand above the door handle. When all were ready, he shoved the metal door wide open, dropping straight into a low crouch in case of any response from within.

Some kind of metal baton swung at the spot where his face had been moments before. Luthor gasped as he saw into the room first, raising the angle of his bow at the last moment to loose the arrow high into the air. He shot out an arm to knock Erin's aim high as several shrieks erupted from the room.

A woman staggered into the doorway, carried by the momentum of her swing. She was partially lit by a few torch beams coming from inside the room; for a few moments it was hard to make her out with so many beams of torchlight waving around, but Titus finally centred his beam on her as she blinked out at them.

The fact that she wasn't wearing an environmental suit struck them first, then the paleness of her skin. Her hair was lank, her eyes shadowed, and her stomach round and large despite her small frame.

Luthor said nothing for a moment, simply lowering his bow to lean it against the wall, clearly shaken by how close he'd been to shooting her. “We're not going to hurt you,” he finally replied. “We're here to rescue you.”

Taking this in, she dropped the metal bar with a clang and threw herself forward, wrapping her arms around him to sob into his chest. He gingerly put his arms around her as other women came into view, peering out at the strangers in the corridor, all of them in various stages of late pregnancy.

“My God,” Shannon croaked. “Who on earth are you? Are you prisoners?”

They all shook their heads. “No,” one replied.

“What happened?” another shrieked hysterically. “They didn't tell us anything. Who are you?”

A hurried exchange of information followed, whilst the children stared openly at their swollen bellies. “We listened at the door,” the woman with the weapon told Luthor. “We heard all kinds of awful things, then nothing, for ages. We thought you were coming to kill us. We've heard about savages on the surface …”

“We're not going to kill you.” Jay smiled, recovering from the near overwhelming delight of seeing so many women in one place. “We live up above.” He slipped an arm around one of the younger mothers who was shaking with nerves. “You can come
up too, live with me and my Boys. We'll look after ya.”

“That is absurd,” Luthor scoffed. “They will come with me to the Red Lady.”

“Who says?” Jay rounded on Luthor, straightening himself up.