Dead Man Running (14 page)

The dock was like a giant concrete spider, leg-like jetties stretching out across the water in all directions, boats chained to posts alongside them. There were cockroaches everywhere, driving trucks, loading things in and out of boats, patrolling the jetties with assault rifles cradled in their arms.

In Six's time, there had always been a sliver of blue sky on the distant horizon, too far away for the City's pollution to touch. Not any more.

‘Goddamn,' Ten whispered. ‘There are hundreds of them.'

‘Keep it together,' Six said. One of the jetties seemed to have fewer cockroaches on it than the others. He drove the truck along it, examining each boat as they cruised past.

Too slow, he thought. Too big. Too heavy.

‘Go all the way to the end,' Ten said. ‘Otherwise people driving past might notice we don't know what we're doing.'

Six nodded. He drove the truck up to the tip of the jetty. The second-last boat was perfect – a speedboat with an inboard motor, big enough to go fast, but small enough that he and Ten could handle it by themselves. Turning the engine off, Six engaged the handbrake and climbed out. He jogged over to the boat to get a closer look. There was no sense unloading their gear until they knew for sure they'd found the right vessel.

Six heaved on the mooring line and the boat floated closer to the jetty. He jumped in and took a look at the controls. The fuel gauge was reading at three-quarters full, and the ignition was just a button with
engine start
printed on it. This was typical of military-style ChaoSonic vehicles – in the middle of a battle, no cockroach wanted to have to worry about finding the right key.

Six pushed the button and the engine sputtered, caught, and purred. ‘We're good,' he called to Ten.

Ten unrolled the rear door of the truck, picked up the heliox canisters and carried them over to the edge of the jetty. He threw them down to Six, who caught them and rolled them under the seats. Ten went back to get more gear.

‘Hey!'

Six turned to see a cockroach approaching. He reached for his dart gun – and then realised that the soldier was moving at a brisk walk, not a run. He suspected something was wrong, but wasn't sure.

We can bluff our way through this, Six thought. As long as Ten doesn't freak out.

‘What's up?' he called.

‘You got permission to take that boat out?' the cockroach demanded.

‘Yeah,' Six said. He turned to Ten, who was standing beside the truck with the rest of the gear in his arms. ‘You signed for this, right?'

Ten nodded. ‘Sure, why?'

The cockroach said, ‘There's nothing on the schedule.'

Six sighed. ‘Incompetent bureaucrats,' he said. ‘So which boat
do
they have us marked down as taking?'

‘I don't know. But it isn't this one.'

‘Well this is the one we requisitioned,' Six said. ‘Take it up with the boss.'

The cockroach was silent for a while. ‘Okay, sure,' he said finally, and turned to walk away.

Six exhaled slowly. That was close.

One of the operatives in the back of the truck groaned.

The cockroach whirled around. ‘What was that?'

Ten patted his belly, glaring at Six. ‘The breakfast I
still
haven't had.' His acting was so good that Six almost believed him.

The cockroach stared at Ten. ‘That was your stomach?'

‘You better believe it,' Six grumbled, his heart pounding. ‘It could enter a singing contest.'

‘You should get that checked out,' the cockroach told Ten.

‘I don't need a doctor,' he replied. ‘I need about a kilogram of French toast.'

The cockroach snorted and started to walk away, shaking his head.

Then the operative started screaming.

The cockroach's hand went to his gun so fast it was a blur. But Six got there first.

Blam!
An anaesthetic dart hit the cockroach in the neck and he slumped to the ground.

Ten picked him up as Six jumped back up onto the jetty. He ran over to the truck and peered in. The young male operative had dragged himself up into a crouch and was yelling his head off: ‘Help! Somebody help us!'

Six shot him. He tumbled forwards and landed facedown on the floor of the truck.

Ten lifted the cockroach into the truck, took his radio, shut the door and locked it. Six scanned the jetty to see if any of the other cockroaches in the distance had heard.

‘You should have given them more tranquilliser,' Ten said.

Six shook his head. ‘They could have died.'

‘So could we.'

Six didn't reply. There was no sign from any of the cockroaches in the distance that they had heard the commotion.

‘The other one will wake up soon,' Ten said. ‘If anyone comes this far up the jetty, they could hear her yelling.'

Six nodded. ‘We'd better get out of here before that happens.'

‘When they find the truck and realise the boat's missing, they'll blow us up.'

‘You drive,' Six said. ‘I'll find the bomb.'

Ten gathered up the dive suits and harpoon guns and jumped into the boat. Six untied the rope from the jetty and followed him.

Ten gunned the engine and the boat blasted out into the choppy sea. Six kept watching the jetty just long enough to make sure that no-one was taking much notice of their departure. Then he started searching for the bomb.

He ran to the back of the boat, where there was a hatch in the deck. When planting a bomb in a building, Six knew, ChaoSonic operatives tried to find a location of structural significance – somewhere on the ground floor, usually in one of the corners, so the building would be pushed off balance and collapse. But vehicles were different. When planting a bomb in a car or a boat, the sensible choice was somewhere near the fuel tank, so a large explosion could be ignited with only a small charge.

Six grabbed a torch, lifted the hatch, and dropped down into the hold. The engine was easy to find in the cramped space. The sound was deafening. Six ignored the valves and gaskets and coolant tanks and focused on a thin tube he assumed was a fuel line. He followed it into the gloom, and soon the torch beam found the fuel tank – a dark, round blob of metal. It was bigger than Six had expected. Assuming it was full, the explosion it created would leave the boat in coin-sized pieces. And it could go off at any minute.

Six shone the light on the underside of the tank. There was nothing there. He crawled right around it, looking for anything that might be the bomb – but besides the fuel lines and the lid, the tank was completely featureless.

Six squeezed his eyes shut and plugged his fingers in his ears, trying to shut out the roaring of the engine so he could think. It didn't make sense to plant a bomb anywhere else on the boat. But it also didn't make sense to put explosives in other vehicles and not this one.

What am I missing? Six thought. And then the answer came to him.

He unscrewed the lid of the tank and lifted it off. The fumes hit him, making the air seem to shimmer and flooding his brain with dizziness. Six took off his armour and peeled off his T-shirt – he didn't want them to be flammable later – and dipped his arm into the tank.

The most shocking thing was the cold. Six had expected it to be hot, or at least room temperature, but instead it was so cold his cuticles stung.

He couldn't feel anything at this depth. If there was a bomb in here, it wouldn't be floating. It would be fixed to the wall, or resting on the bottom. Gritting his teeth, he pushed his arm deeper into the petrol.

There – something hard. Not the floor of the tank. Square and loose.

Very carefully, Six pulled the object out. It was a scorpion-like thing, bristling with bolts and wires. Six could see a battery, a detonator and a wireless receiver. This was it.

He put the lid back on the tank and carried the bomb and his clothes back up to the deck. Ten was pulling on his dive suit.

‘We're here,' he said.

‘I found the bomb,' Six told him. He put it on one of the seats.

‘Throw it overboard.'

Six shook his head. ‘The explosive charge is tiny. Outside the fuel tank, it's not going to do us any harm. And when it goes off, we'll know they've found the truck.'

Six grabbed the other dive suit, unzipped it and stepped into it. His petrol-covered arm already felt strangely dry as he pulled the dive unit straps over his shoulders.

There was a humming from his bag – his phone. Six dug it out. There was a text message from a number he didn't recognise, but when he read the message, he knew who it must be from; the copy of himself, who he now thought of as ‘Beta'.

The message was only four characters long:
1884
.

Good, Six thought. Beta had finished the unpleasant task Six had assigned him.

His radio crackled. ‘Agent Six, come in.'

Ten glanced over sharply. ‘Who's that?'

‘Sounds like King,' Six said. He held the radio to his face and pressed the transmit button. ‘I'm here.'

‘Thought you'd want to know,' King said. ‘I've had a look at the coordinates of the seismic sensor and, well . . . you're actually diving over Surabaya.'

‘
What?
' In pre-Takeover times, Surabaya had been a city of three million people. But it was only five metres above sea level, and had been one of the first to be submerged as the oceans rose. The city had gone from a thriving metropolis to a sinking slum to an underwater relic in less than a decade. Six had expected to be diving past coastal shelves and reefs of long-dead coral, not suspension bridges and skyscrapers.

‘I don't know if this changes your strategy,' King said. ‘I just thought I should give you a heads-up.'

Six strapped the heliox canisters to his back. ‘Do you know if the seismic sensor is likely to be buried under any of the buildings?'

‘I doubt that. The buildings have been there longer than it has. Our agent would have wanted it to be as deep as possible, so check the stormwater drains and sewer tunnels within fifty metres of the GPS coordinates.'

‘Okay,' Six said. ‘We'll contact you again when we're back on the surface.'

‘We? Who's we?'

Six rolled his eyes. ‘Remember? You ordered Ten to babysit me?'

‘No I didn't. Ten's been missing for two days.'

Six whirled around, his stomach clenching in sudden fright –

And found Ten already pointing a harpoon gun at him.

INTO THE BLACKNESS

‘This isn't what you think,' Ten growled.

Six stayed absolutely still. ‘Then put the gun down.'

‘And let you beat the crap out of me? No thanks. Step back.'

Six did.

‘You think I'm a ChaoSonic spy,' Ten said. ‘I'm not.'

Six's mind was racing. He thought about how Ten had refused to leave his side for the last two days. How angry he'd looked when he discovered Jack was still alive. How he'd been in charge of the investigation, and how it had turned up nothing but dead ends.

‘I don't think you're a spy,' Six said. ‘You're Double Tap.'

Ten's finger was on the trigger. ‘You're wrong,' he said. But his voice wavered. He's lying, Six thought.

This explained how Double Tap had been getting in and out of the Deck. And why he'd been so careful to hide his face.

‘Why haven't you killed me yet?' Six asked. ‘You've had plenty of opportunities.' You could shoot me right now, he thought.

‘Because I'm not the killer,' Ten said.

But he is, Six thought. It all fits. So he must need me for something.

‘Six?' King demanded. ‘Are you still there?'

‘Tell him everything's fine,' Ten said. ‘Tell him you assumed I was here at his request, but actually I just volunteered to help out.'

‘If I tell him that, you'll kill me,' he said.

‘It's the truth,' Ten said.

But if I try to warn King, Six thought, he'll shoot me anyway. What do I do?

‘Talk to me, Six,' King said.

Six wondered, How can I warn him without Ten realising?

‘Do it,' Ten said. ‘And then I'll explain everything.'

‘Okay,' Six said. ‘I'm doing it.'

He raised the radio. Pressed the transmit button.

‘King,' he began, ‘I –'

And then the bomb exploded.

There was an ear-splitting
crack
as the charge detonated and a flash of light as it ignited the dried petrol coating it. Six reacted quickest – he could have launched forwards and made a grab for the gun, but he expected Ten to pull the trigger in shock, and didn't want to get impaled. Instead, he threw himself sideways and tumbled overboard.

He hit the freezing water just as he heard Ten yell, ‘Six! Wait!' The polluted salt water stung his eyes as he swam downwards as fast as he could to get out of reach of the harpoon. When he guessed that he was deep enough to be invisible from the surface, he pulled his goggles onto his face. Useless. They were full of water.

Being able to breathe was more important than being able to see. Six pressed his mask against his mouth and exhaled as hard as he could. Water exploded out the valves. Heliox flooded into the mask and he sucked it into his lungs.

After a few deep breaths, Six tilted the mask, exhaled through his nose and watched as the bubbles rose up and filled the goggles. He pulled the mask back down onto his face and stretched the rubber strap over his head. There was still a little water sloshing around the bottom, but he could see.

If I go to the surface, Six thought, Ten will shoot me. But I can't just wait here for the boat to leave – once it does, I'm stranded.

I don't have my torch, or my helmet, or my harpoon gun. My radio is waterproof, but I can't talk under water. How can I tell King what's happened?

He had one other option. Go down to Surabaya, find a watertight space, and fill it using the canisters. Then he could radio King and work out his next move.

The decision was made for him. His weight-belt was attached to the dive suit. He was already sinking down into the darkness.

He didn't see the splash up above. Ten was coming after him.

Six had been falling for almost ten minutes when the first skyscraper appeared below. The spire was strangely sharp, even up close, even after all these years – it was like the sword of a giant, looming out of the blackness of the invisible streets below.

Six's eyesight was very good, but there was so little light down here that everything seemed ghostly and shapeless. It was a thousand times worse than the fog in the City – although perhaps that too would someday be this impenetrable.

The only sound was the hissing of his breaths. The heliox was odourless and tasteless, and he felt nothing but the cold – this muting of his senses made him feel like an astronaut, exploring the ruins of an alien planet in a dark, silent corner of the universe.

Six twisted the valves on the aluminium canisters, switching from a mix of eighty per cent helium to ninety. At this depth, trying to breathe twenty per cent oxygen could be fatal.

As he sank past the spire, Six lit one of the flares and threw it downwards. It plummeted fifteen metres before decelerating to match his speed, sputtering lolly-green like a firework. Other buildings appeared in the dancing light – towering hotels and banks and insurance company headquarters, signs rusted away, windows smashed by the massive pressure. As Six descended past an office building, he saw a maze of cubicles through one of the windows. A hammerhead shark was cruising through them, stalking a school of fish.

The streets were visible now, littered with wheel-less cars and broken glass. Lumpy green muck – algae, perhaps – was growing across the asphalt.

Six doubted that any of the cars would be airtight enough for him to use to make his distress call, even if he could find one with the windows still intact. A bomb shelter would work, and a science lab would be even better, but Six had no idea where he'd find either of those things in a strange city. They wouldn't appear on maps, which would have long since rotted away anyway. And it wasn't as though there was anyone around he could ask for directions.

A fridge, Six thought. That'd work, if I could find one.

He landed on the street and immediately slipped over, falling onto the soft algae. It felt like a damp blanket beneath him.

As he stood, he unfastened two of the weights from his belt. The remaining eighteen kilograms should be enough to keep him grounded, but would leave him able to move more quickly. He only had two hours of breathing time and he needed to make every minute of that count.

Debris billowed in his wake as he walked down the street. He needed to find an apartment building, or a restaurant, where the fridge would be easy to locate. But in this murky wasteland it was almost impossible to tell what each building had been. Looters and water pressure had trashed every doorway until it was completely unclear what lay beyond.

The flare behind him was fading. Six lit another and threw it further down the road.

There was an intact sign up ahead – it read
Museum Mpu Tantular
. Apparently this had once been the cultural centre of Surabaya, which probably meant there were restaurants nearby. Maybe if –

Something was moving in the distance. Not a shark. Something upright.

Six stared at the impossible shape. It appeared to be a man, walking up the footpath. Six's first thought was that another diver was here – had Ten followed him down? – but as the man got closer, Six saw that there was no air tank, no breathing mask, no dive gear at all. The man was wearing a suit and tie. He looked like he was on his way to work, oblivious of the fact that the whole city was under water.

Six had never had much interest in horror stories – as a teenager he was too busy, and as a child he'd already realised that the real world was frightening enough. But just the same, this man made him think of ghosts, doomed to haunt their deathplaces forever.

Six was already backing away when the flare fully illuminated the man's face. Most of his flesh had been nibbled away by fish. One eye was missing and, as Six watched, a spindly crab crawled out of the socket. The man's remaining eye was staring into the distance somewhere behind Six.

There were plastic rings around each of his fingers.

One of the Revived, Six thought. How did he get down here? Who sent him? Why?

Looking over the man's shoulder, Six saw that there were others. Another dozen half-eaten ghouls were lumbering through the darkness further down the street. There were manacles around their ankles, perhaps to keep them from floating away.

Six ran across the road, hoping to take refuge in one of the shops. Every stride was a battle against the water pressure. He felt like he was moving in slow motion.

Eventually he reached a doorway and risked a glance over his shoulder to see if the corpses had gained on him.

They hadn't. In fact, they didn't seem to be taking any notice of him – they were still lurching through the gloom in the same direction, a silent march to an unknown goal.

If they're not after me, Six wondered, then why are they here?

Perhaps this was where they came from.

Six's brain went into hyperdrive. If Ten was Double Tap, then he wouldn't need to plant a bug on a seismic sensor to steal Deck intelligence. He'd attach it to one of the broadband cables inside the building. So what if the seismic sensor was being used for another purpose? What if ChaoSonic operatives were down here, draining the electricity and using it to conduct experiments on the dead?

The theory didn't quite fit all the facts – why wouldn't ChaoSonic do this on land, using their own power? But Six felt like he was getting closer to the truth.

If he followed the Revived he might be able to find where these experiments were being done. But contacting King had to be his first priority. So he slipped through the empty doorframe and went looking for a fridge.

When he lit another flare, he found himself in what seemed to be a hotel lobby. The ceiling was high and ornate, there was an escalator leading to a long counter, and there were hooks buried in the walls where paintings had probably hung. But whatever splendour the room might once have had was smothered under decades of settled grime.

Six climbed the escalator and walked past the counter, scattering a school of fish who'd been dancing around his feet. The guest rooms would be of no use to him – he needed a fridge big enough to climb inside. But perhaps there would be a restaurant on this floor.

The wall up ahead had rotted away in places. Maybe it had once been a door. Six put his hands against the panels and pushed. The wood crumbled, soft as sponge cake, to reveal a dining hall. A maze of broken tables and chairs rose from the floor like ribs in an elephants' graveyard. His shadow shivered on the wall, surrounded by the magnesium glare.

The far side of the restaurant was open to the ocean – there had probably been floor-to-ceiling windows there. Six crossed the room and looked out to see that the street on this side was filled with more of the walking dead – but moving in the opposite direction. Did this mean they had what they'd come for?

And then Six saw that one of them was dragging Agent Ten along the ground.

He was alive, but unconscious. Bubbles rose from his mask each time he exhaled. As Six watched Ten's legs bounce along the pavement, he supposed he should be relieved that ChaoSonic had put the serial killer out of action. But he couldn't help but feel that whoever was in charge down here might be even more dangerous.

A phrase drifted through his head, something King used to say a lot:
Better the devil you know than the devil you don't
.

I'll get to the bottom of this, Six promised himself. I'll find out why Ten killed my friends, and who's bringing the dead back to life, and then I'll lock them both up. But I have to tell King what's happening first.

There was a bar to his left. The kitchen would be somewhere behind there. Six skirted around it, broken glass crunching under his rubber-soled dive shoes.

The kitchen was somehow cleaner than the rest of the hotel – some parts of the walls still shone in the light from the flare. Perhaps the sea creatures who'd infested every other surface found the slippery tiles difficult to cling to. But the broken pipes under the sink were teeming with life. Anemones swayed in the gentle currents, and in an open drain on the floor, Six could see a moray eel, staring at him with alien eyes, opening and closing its mouth as if mechanical.

There was a steel fridge near the back of the room. Looking at it, Six realised that he had a problem. To fill the fridge with heliox, he'd need to let the water escape somehow. But the only way out was the door, and if he opened it, the gas would flood out and more water would pour in.

Six opened the door, pulled all the shelves out and tossed them aside. Cans and bottles and startled hermit crabs floated away across the kitchen. Six grabbed the fridge with both hands and pulled. The support brackets behind it were rusty and weak, and after a second or two, they snapped. He stepped aside as the fridge tipped over and crashed silently to the floor, facedown.

Problem solved. Six heaved the fridge up onto its side, crawled beneath it and pulled it back down on top of him. Now the water could pour out the bottom as the top filled up with air.

Six took one of the deep-mix canisters off his back and found the release valve. He put the flare on the floor so that it wouldn't be exposed to the gas – he didn't think heliox was flammable, but he didn't want to take any chances.