Dead Man Running (17 page)

The box held a dead man. He was naked, curled up on his side like a sleeping cat. His skin shone in the dim light. As Six leaned in, he saw that the body had been shrink-wrapped. Blood glistened under the plastic that surrounded his head. He'd been shot.

He hasn't been reanimated yet, Six realised. This is a morgue, for storing the future Revived.

It was hard to tell under the plastic, but the face looked familiar to Six. He reached in and very carefully turned the head towards him.

The frozen expression of terror sickened him. He
did
know this man. It was Pic Guerye, his old informant. Kyntak's ninetieth victim – or eighty-ninth, since Jack wasn't really dead.

‘I'm sorry, buddy,' Six whispered. He thought about removing the plastic and closing Pic's eyes, and then decided not to. It wouldn't help Pic – nothing could, now. There was no time for pointless gestures.

All of these boxes probably contained dead bodies. There was nothing useful here.

There was a door in the corner, bolted shut. Six was about to pull back the bolt and go through when something about one of the boxes caught his eye.

There was a second power input on it, hooked up to a car battery. If the base's electricity failed, all the other boxes would warm up, spoiling the contents, but not this one. Also, unlike any of the other boxes, this one was fastened shut by a hefty padlock.

What's so special about that one? Six wondered. What's in there?

He walked over to it and felt the padlock. It was heavy, but not impregnable. After thirty seconds of digging, using a pin he'd removed from the box's hinges, the lock popped open. He heaved on the lid and it swung open.

No mist this time. The box must have been opened recently. Six spent a split second looking at the body – naked, male, cocooned in plastic – and then screamed as he recognised the face.

It was his own.

There was a bullet hole, meticulously cleaned, over the heart. Another one nestled between the corpse's eyebrows. For a second Six thought this might have been Beta, the duplicate he'd used Allich's machine to create. But then he saw the sadness in the dead boy's eyes and realised that it was far more likely that this was the missing body from his murder case. This was the Six who'd been shot by his own sister.

Six looked at the car battery and the padlock and the door. His pulse quickened as he realised two things which he should have figured out earlier. One, he knew exactly who was reanimating the dead. And two, since the door was bolted from the inside, there must be someone in here with him.

‘Hello, Six,' Retuni Lerke said.

FACE TO FACE

‘It's good to see you.'

Six was backing away from the bald, wrinkled apparition. ‘I should have known you were behind this,' he said. ‘Who else would think an army of corpses was a good idea?'

Lerke's eyes bored into Six's. ‘Is that any way to talk to your old man?'

The last time Six had seen his creator in the flesh, he'd been a high-ranking ChaoSonic official and Six had been a foetus in a jar. It was now almost twenty-one years later, and Lerke didn't seem to be any less insane.

‘After I was murdered, Nai brought you my body,' Six guessed. ‘And you spent four years working out how to raise the dead, just so you wouldn't have to let me go.'

‘Maybe someday you'll become a parent,' Lerke said. ‘Then you'll understand.'

Six remembered the look on Nai's face as the undead appeared at the warehouse window. She'd seen them before.

I was sick of being his garbage collector.

‘You sent her out to find dead bodies for you to experiment on,' Six continued. ‘But you gave up on me. My brain was scrambled by the bullet and replacing it with a computer wasn't good enough for you. So you sent your walking corpses after Kyntak – the last sample of the immortal genome you designed.'

‘He's not a “sample,” ' Lerke insisted. ‘He's my son. I didn't want to lose all my children.'

Six bumped into one of the boxes on the wall. He edged sideways through the darkness. Lerke kept moving towards him.

‘You're making me sound like a monster,' he continued. ‘Remember, I didn't kill any of these people. I just put their remains to good use.'

‘Most of the corpses never came back. And the ones who did were empty-handed. When you read their hard drives to find out why, you saw me in their video files. So you set a trap for me down here.'

‘If I could have visited you on the surface, peacefully, I would have. But the Deck would lock me up if they found me up there. ChaoSonic would kill me.'

‘You don't even need to steal power from the Deck's seismic sensor,' Six said. ‘Right? This facility must be self-sufficient – you drained the sensor just so as I would come down here to investigate.'

‘Actually, I set that up ages ago,' Lerke said. ‘I was expecting a visit from Kyntak. But don't get me wrong, I'm very glad to see you.'

‘But when I showed up,' Six said, shouting now, ‘you poisoned me, and tried to convince me that my whole life had been a dream. Why?'

‘For your own good,' Lerke said.

Six brandished his only weapon, the shard of glass. ‘How could you possibly think that was good?'

‘I was worried that whoever murdered you would do it again. But I didn't know who it was, and I knew you'd never tell me.' Lerke shook his head. ‘Nai. I can't believe it – she told me she found you in the boot of a ChaoSonic patrol car.'

Six's jaw fell open. He remembered Erist's voice, so careful:
Does anyone stand out from the dreams? Maybe someone who hurt you, or someone you felt threatened by?

‘You destroyed my sense of reality,' he said, ‘just for that?'

Lerke looked apologetic. ‘It was the only way. I couldn't go to the surface myself, and my troops –' he gestured at the boxes ‘– are too limited, mentally. They can't investigate things. You were the only person who –'

‘Shut up!' Six crushed his free hand into a fist. ‘I don't have time for your lunacy. How do I get out of here?'

‘You can't,' Lerke said.

Six waved the broken glass at him. ‘Tell me or I'll kill you.'

‘No you won't.'

He was right. Six knew the suffocating guilt that came after taking a life. He wouldn't put himself through it again. But right now, his life depended on convincing Lerke that this wasn't true. He stopped backing away and stepped forward instead. Gripping Lerke by the shirt collar, he pressed the glass against the old man's ear.

‘I will,' he said. ‘I'll cut so many chunks off you that you'll
beg
me to finish you off.'

‘You can't leave,' Lerke said again. ‘There's no way out. There are no dive suits, no oxygen tanks. There was a mini sub, but the actors have just taken it. We're stuck down here until my troops on the surface send it back.'

Six paled. ‘How long will that take?'

‘Five hours. Until then, it's just you and me.'

But there were only twenty-five minutes until the Deck's bomb landed.

‘You're lying,' Six said. ‘You've been lying to me for days. Why should I trust you now?'

Lerke shrugged. ‘By all means look around. There's no way out.'

I don't have time to ‘look around', Six thought. He picked Lerke up and slammed him, back first, into the wall. ‘Tell me how to get out of here!' he roared.

‘Maybe the drugs are still affecting your brain chemistry,' Lerke said, looking concerned. ‘I should sedate you again.'

He reached for something in his pocket. Six grabbed his wrist as he withdrew it, stopping the old man from injecting him with anything – but it didn't look like a syringe. It looked like a beeper for a garage door. Before Six could stop him, Lerke pushed the button.

There was a hiss as the lids on all the boxes swung open. Six watched as a shrink-wrapped hand rose out of the mist, a plastic ring on every finger, and grabbed the edge of the box.

Panic was crushing Six's heart. This place wasn't for storing future experiments, he realised. It was for all the bodies who'd already been operated on, and were ready to be shipped out.

The Revived sat up together like synchronised swimmers. All their faces turned towards Six. Their sad, hollow eyes locked onto his.

‘Call them off,' Six whispered.

‘No,' Lerke said.

The corpses stood as one. They started scratching at themselves like mosquito-bitten children, slowly shedding the plastic that cocooned them.

‘Call them off!'

‘It's for your own good,' Lerke said again.

I'm practically naked, Six realised. I have so much exposed skin that there's no way to stop them from tranquillising me. I have nothing to defend myself with except this piece of glass, and it won't be able to stop them. I need something hard, heavy. A club.

He scanned the room, but there was nothing. Just him, Lerke, some empty boxes, and a hundred living dead between him and the door.

‘Don't worry, Six,' Lerke was saying. ‘It's just like falling asleep.
Hush, little baby, in the treetop . 
. .'

Six shoved him away and looked up, trying to find the maintenance hatch he'd come in through. But it was even further away than the door. He'd have to push past twenty corpses just to get to it.

Perhaps he could use one of the empty boxes as a battering ram. He grabbed one of them and tried to lift it, but it wouldn't budge. It was bolted to the floor.

One of the Revived was almost within reach. It smelled like a cold chicken fillet. Its mouth was hanging open, exposing shattered teeth. And suddenly Six knew where to find a weapon that might protect him.

He reached out, grabbed the dead man's jaw and pulled with all his might. There was a sickening snap as the vertebrae detached, and then the head came right off, leaving the neck spitting fake blood at the ceiling. Six kicked the rest of the body away. He hefted the severed head. The skull was the thickest and hardest bone in the human body, and when filled with flesh, it weighed almost two kilograms.

Lerke had stopped singing his jumbled lullaby and was screeching at Six: ‘What are you
doing
?'

‘Call them off,' Six yelled. ‘Or you'll lose them.'

‘Put that down!'

There was no time to argue any more. Using the jaw as a handle, Six swung the severed head into the nearest Revived's face. Its nose exploded into a bloody mess and it staggered back, stunned. Sensing movement behind him, Six whirled around and slammed the head against the ear of an approaching body. Its head twisted sideways and the arms went limp – he'd broken its neck.

Six gripped this one by the jaw and pulled its head off too. Now he had two clubs, one for each hand.

He turned to face the door. There were about fifteen corpses between him and it. He charged.

The first body went down after he smashed one of the severed heads up into its chin. The second flew backwards across the room after a sternum-snapping strike to the chest. The third almost touched Six with its poisoned rings – but Six blocked the blow with one of the heads and thumped its stomach with the other. The dead body coughed up something slimy and red and tripped over, landing facedown. It didn't get up again.

Six whirled towards the door, arms spinning like helicopter blades. The bones of his attackers crunched all around him. The Revived were slumping to the floor everywhere. The severed heads he carried were shiny with blood. By the time he hit the door, the remaining undead were approaching much more slowly, because they kept tripping over Six's victims.

Six dropped one of the heads, grabbed the bolt and pulled. It slid aside. An outstretched hand reached for Six's shoulder. He ducked under it as he heaved the door open.

‘Give up, Six!' Lerke was shouting. ‘You've got nowhere to go!'

Six dived through the door and pulled it closed behind him, silencing the voice. There was no bolt on this side of the door. He held it closed as he looked around for something to jam it with. There was a fire blanket on the wall, just within reach. Six tugged the grey fabric out and tied one end of it to the door handle. Then he tied the other end to one of the water pipes that ran up the wall.

Tentatively, he let go of the handle. The door rattled as the undead pulled on it from the other side, but the blanket held. Six moved away from the door. He was safe – until the bomb turned this place into rubble in nineteen minutes.

Despite what he'd said, he doubted Lerke was lying about there being no way out of here. The old man clearly never left, and the living dead didn't need dive gear.

Looking around, he found himself in the engine room he'd passed over earlier. The giant battery was humming on the floor in front of him, right next to the pit that led down to the seismic sensor. From this angle, Six could see that there was a lid, made from a piece of thirty-centimetre-thick lead, which could be used to seal off the pit. Makes sense, he thought. If the seismic sensor detected a volcanic eruption, they'd want to be able to stop any lava from –

Six looked up at the box on the wall. The box marked
blasting kit
.

That's my way out, he realised. It's a long shot. But it just might work.

Six opened the kit. He'd expected a small selection of blasting caps, but what he found was an enormous lump of C-4. He lifted it out carefully. It weighed about eight and a half kilograms. Enough to vaporise a city block.

He put the C-4 on the floor and examined the other equipment in the kit. Timers, remote detonators and sleeves which, when wrapped around the C-4, would cause it to explode on impact. He put all these things on the floor beside the battery.

As he worked, he wondered: What am I going to do when I get to the surface? How can I stop Kyntak from hurting anybody else? Maybe –

His train of thought hit a wall. If Kyntak was Double Tap, then Ten was innocent. And the last time he'd seen Ten, undead slaves had been dragging him across the ocean floor. He was probably here somewhere. Perhaps alive, perhaps needing Six's help.

Six bit his lip. The Deck's bomb would hit in just under fifteen minutes. Did he have time to search the rest of the base for a man who might be dead already, and then come back here and blast his way out?

He spent two precious seconds thinking about it. And then picked up the severed head, opened the other door, and ran out.

Trees. Birds. A river.

For a second, Six thought this might be another one of Lerke's tricks. He seemed to have found himself in a moonlit forest. But then he saw that none of the birds in the trees was moving. They'd been stuffed. Nor was the river flowing – it was a pane of warped glass, through which Six could see stuffed fish. The trees smelled like they were made of plastic, not wood. The moon was in fact just a spotlight in the ceiling.

There was a sign by the river, half of which was written in English, the other half in a language that Six couldn't read. In the bottom corner there was a logo and some text:
Surabaya Museum of Natural History
.

Now Six realised what Lerke had done. He'd built his base as an extension of this building. It was an intelligent move. A museum would have plenty of airtight rooms and it was unlikely to have been damaged by looters, who would have been more interested in fossil fuels than regular fossils.

Six called out, ‘Ten?'

The fake jungle offered no reply.

There was a wooden bridge spanning the glass river. Six crept across it, listening for the shuffling of approaching corpses. He heard nothing other than the creaks of the planks under his feet.